You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

This episode contains explicit language.

Maggie Rogers had a breakthrough moment when she was a student at NYU's Clive Davis Institute.

For Elle Williams, visited her class and when he heard her song Alaska, his reaction was dramatic and caught on video.

The video of For Elle listening to Maggie's song went viral and Alaska became a hit with over 40 million streams on Spotify alone.

Maggie Rogers is now playing sold out shows across the country just a year after graduating from college.

In this episode, Maggie tells a story of what came before that day in class, all the steps and missteps that eventually led to her writing the song Alaska.

My name is Maggie Rogers and I'm very excited to be on Song Exploder.

I grew up writing music and grew up producing my own music and this is something that I've always done.

I played banjo and made folk music and grew up in this world place and identified myself in that culture.

Waiting for you to come home.

I grew up in a really rural area in Maryland and moved to New York when I was 18.

I went to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at Tissue School of the Arts at NYU for college to study engineering, production and the music industry.

I think because I was suddenly starting to learn about engineering and production and the way that it is properly done, it made me really question the way I'd always just done it at home.

And it made me a little bit insecure and I didn't really know what to do.

After my freshman year of college, I went on hiking trip to Alaska.

It was a month long, it was a program called Knowles where I was training to be an outdoor guide and I didn't see another person other than the group I was hiking with through a month.

Alaska was really hard and that actually was kind of amazing.

But when I got back from Alaska, I went through an awful period of writer's block and it was really crippling because music was sort of always the way that I've identified myself and my thoughts and my personality outwardly.

I've always known what I'm interested in and what I'm feeling because of the way my music sounds.

And so suddenly there was no music and I felt super lost and it was really weird and I didn't also feel like I was a folk musician anymore.

During those two and a half years I definitely tried making music a couple times and made some of the worst music I've ever made.

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