Maggie Rogers worked the Fillmore box office for fans on Sunday morning. Then she played a sold-out at TLA.
The show was in celebration of her new album 'Don't Forget Me.' She's coming back to the much larger Wells Fargo Center in October.
Maggie Rogers got up close and personal with her Philly fans not once but twice on Sunday.
First she met people face-to-face as she worked the Fillmore box office as the tickets, which could only be purchased in-person, went on sale early in the a.m. Then Rogers played a jam-packed Theatre of Living Arts in a 100-minute set, in which she joyfully led her seven-piece band.
It was all a celebration of Don’t Forget Me, which came out Friday and is the stellar third album by the Maryland-born NYU and Harvard Divinity School grad who turns 30 this month. The TLA show had mostly female fans queuing up and down South Street while motorbikes roared by on a breezy spring evening.
The show at the 1,000-capacity TLA was the second of four that Rogers is playing in rooms far smaller than the ones she is capable of filling. She performed in New York on Saturday and is headed to Boston and Chicago this week. It was an ultra-intimate evening for Rogers, a rapidly rising star who played the Mann Center in Fairmount Park last summer. On Oct. 15, she is coming to the Wells Fargo Center in South Philly, which is 20 times the TLA’s size.
Fans who had gotten up early to assure themselves the right to scrunch into the TLA were appreciative of the singularity of the occasion. And they had done their homework.
Rogers, who played solo piano on “I Still Do”and acoustic guitar on a handful of other songs, performed Don’t Forget Me, in its entirety. The crowd seemed to have spent the last two days learning all the words to the the album, which Rogers cowrote and produced with Ian Fitchuk.
There’s heartache in those songs. “Never Going Home” and “The Kill” bring to mind Rogers’ musical forebears, from Fleetwood Mac and Sheryl Crow to Kacey Musgraves, who Fitchuk also produced, and who the title cut evokes.
But Don’t Forget Me brims with self-assurance and a focused energy of an artist fully coming to her own and that confidence and sense of fun filled up the room on Sunday as Rogers bounded about like the expert front woman she is.
Besides the new material, Rogers took requests, mostly for the hits from her first two albums, and she closed her pre-encore set with “That’s Where I Am,” from 2022′s Surrender. That song played out as a promise to keep a connection alive with her community of fans, a promise that “wherever you go, that’s where I am.”
At the TLA, a thousand voices sang those words aloud, and it was easy to imagine what it would sound like with 19,000-or-so more at the Wells Fargo Center as Don’t Forget Me’s songs make their way into the world.