Art that Resonates

How Maggie Rogers' new album and "Good Material" by Dolly Alderton are showing me the way

How do you know when art has worked its magic? 

Because I’ll walk through a museum and I’ll feel like I have a conspicuous, floating question mark bobbing above my head. Does everyone here know I absolutely do not know what I’m looking at? 

Sometimes, it’s a dense article or some jewelry artifact that sends that same blurry blob of unknowing or maybe detachment my way. I admire these artistic expressions, but I find that I sometimes just observe them, appreciate them from afar, but don’t necessarily connect or resonate with them. 

Well, good thing not all art is meant to resonate equally. Good thing the question mark is really just an inclination toward knowing myself, becoming more familiar with what does or doesn’t strike me to my core and touch a soft tender spot within me. 

But sometimes — maybe magically — I find a piece of art that resonates, or it finds me, and I melt right into it, as if the artist scooped the internal dialogue of my being onto a page, a platform, a song, a book.

It reaches its hands out to me, like a baby and a mother all at once. It’s something I care for and tend to, while it simultaneously tends to me, brushes my hair back, puts its warm palms on my back.  

There are two pieces of art that have captured my inner universe this past month — Maggie Rogers’ new album Don’t Forget Me and Dolly Alderton’s book, Good Material.

The cover of Dolly Alderton's 2023 book Good Material, and album cover of Maggie Rogers new album, Don't Forget Me.

They stumbled into my world like kismet and have shaped my April to be revelatory and fun and full of magnificent friendships. I can’t imagine I’m alone in this experience?!

Maggie Rogers and Dolly Alderton are two of my biggest expanders (i.e. someone who literally expands my mindset and my ideas of what is possible in this world). I find myself increasingly drawn toward and expanded by women who live so unapologetically in line with their values. Artists like Maggie and Dolly own the narrative they’re telling, and bask in the comfort of themselves, trusting where they place value — independence, creation, being seen, playfulness.

I love women who articulate exactly what they want and need and crave, without permission, without external validation, and instead with a sureness and a lightness.

Despite the commanding force with which she captivates an audience, Maggie is somehow walking weightlessly on the surface of the stage. She is not stomping, she is dancing. I sit back and watch her pursue her values and follow her impulses and seemingly fleeting desires — that may seem like a whim but are full of promise and reward — with an open heart and something dogged inside, and I am in awe.

This interview articulates great examples of her impulse-following self. Same with this one.

The opening verse in Maggie’s titular song Don’t Forget Me is this: 

“My friend Sally's getting married / And to me that sounds so scary / I'm still tryin' to clean up my side of the street / Can't imagine what would happen /'Cause I'm still acting out of habit / Hoping dirty words just don't escape my teeth”

This very real tension that plays out in the mid-to-late 20s-early 30s womanhood has been circulating in my mind. I wonder how people are dreaming of marriage and settling into some formal, final routine when, by God, it feels like it has only just begun. It’s just the precipice, right? The curtain has just merely opened its red velvet wings. We are nowhere near the end. I want to keep playing.

I definitely ruminate about love and partnership and intimacy, but I don’t think of marriage or weddings or finality. I think about my friends and I think about writing and I think about all the restaurants I want to visit.

I also think maybe I need to re-imagine what traditional life choices look like and stop pointing a finger at them and villainizing them. Maybe I could get curious about why I feel so repelled by tradition recently. Hm.

A similar marriage sentiment plays out in Dolly’s book, Good Material, about a 35 year old guy named Andy, a struggling comedian, who navigates a rough breakup, his friends getting married and having kids, and finding himself.

*SPOILER* The last chapter offers a refreshing perspective, as it’s written from the POV of Andy’s ex-girlfriend, Jen, where readers get a glimpse into why Jen broke up with Andy.

Despite the heart-wrenching difficulty, Jen did it because ultimately, she wanted to be alone. She did it because she felt a full, content life outside of this relationship; and she never felt a draw toward what tradition entailed. She leaned into the inkling to do things differently.

In regards to others’ hankerings for children and marriage, Jen (who I have to think greatly mirrors Dolly herself) offers this sentiment:

“I didn’t want to know all these words, charged with urgency and crisis. I didn’t feel like they related to me. Hadn’t I just turned twenty-one? Hadn’t I just left university? Hadn’t my life only just begun? I couldn’t fathom how I had got here so quickly and how I could be expected to make such enormous decisions while I still felt so young. How had this happened?”

These two excerpts from Good Material and Don’t Forget Me capture this aching to stay young in spirit, and this very real belief that my life is just opening its very eyes, despite the world transpiring and aging around me.

They articulate the intoxication and the accompanying confusion of being a woman that loves just being a woman and existing in the world, without a longing for children and a white picket fence. They simultaneously show the inherent pressure of being a woman and having to decide if you’re bearing children by age 35.

I myself feel like I’m up against some timeline (both metaphorically and physically) to make some decision about what my life should look like, but reading and listening to Dolly and Maggie made me feel less alone in my muddled confusion, less in a rush.

The words of these two women validated my own insecurity about my pull toward an eccentric, twisty-turny life rooted in creation and adventure, more than stability and predictability. I have spent so much time wishing I was more naturally suited for the latter.

This record and this book also bring to the surface the potency of friendships, especially female ones, and how they are some of the greatest loves of our life. Creating this type of art is an act of redefining what love and intimacy can look like.

In the song So Sick of Dreaming, Maggie voices a playful little monologue, saying: 

“So he calls me up 15 minutes before the reservation / And says he's got Knicks tickets instead / I mean, I was at the restaurant, so / I took the steaks to go, I had two martinis at the bar / And went to meet my friends down the street, what a loser”

In Good Material, we hear Andy describe Jen and her friends:

“Jen and her best friends in fluffy white robes, loung­ing in a large suite, drink­ing wine, talk­ing in that way I’d some­times over­hear Jen and her friends talk­ing to each other when they came round to our flat. Each tak­ing turns to present an emo­tion they’ve felt and all of them putting it un­der the mi­cro­scope for in­spec­tion, as if it were a gem with a bil­lion faces.” 

This imagery of trust falling into to female friends for support, to be seen in full, or to just go have FUN is the joie de vivre. The zest of life. Liberating, unashamed FUN! Alongside partnership, my friends — these seemingly nonromantic intimate relationships — are long, companionate romances of my life.

Also, of course, there is something so sexy to me about dirty martinis and a steak and sitting alone at a bar for literally no one but myself.

These works of creation are so celebratory, bringing glory to womanhood and spontaneity. They’re bursting beating and beaming with an exhilarating joy.

Yet, they precisely showcase all the nuance and complexity of a woman trying to craft a life that is healthy, meaning-driven, and connected, but also honors the self and liberates her from expectation to some degree. Sometimes, the two pursuits feel in juxtaposition. The portrayal of the non-traditional life is not all rainbows and butterflies; it sometimes involves heartache and always requires us to take ownership of our choices.

The sentiment I’m taking with me from these pieces of art is that being quiet enough to notice and act in accordance with what’s important to us artists — our values that may be in conflict with the world before us — is so nauseatingly brave. When our internal compass gets the driver’s seat and we gave it time to take its winding drive, there’s redemption waiting for us.

I’ll finish with this.

In Never Going Home, Maggie opens the song with this: 

“Smooth out the lines on my face in the mirror / And think about where I'm gonna go / Put on my red lipstick like a hero / And swallow the fear down my throat” 

God, can’t you see it? Can’t you see yourself alone in the mirror, finishing off your look with a spritz of perfume and a pucker of gloss.

There’s an aching inside of me as I listen to Maggie’s words, and I think it’s because I see myself in them. But, I see myself on the other side of them, the start line, not the finish line, a little too afraid to admit the truth of them, to sing about them in a joyous, public way. I feel they are still stuck inside my journal, sitting on the couch of my therapist's office. As Maggie would say, I fear fear still stuck in my throat.

I don’t have to follow the mold of what has been laid before me. I can continue to carve a path as long as I built the trust muscle of myself. I can look to women like Maggie and Dolly, turn myself toward them and be willing to listen, instead of cower or envy.

This is the type of art I want to bathe in. I want to keep diving into, unwrapping, uncovering, peeking inside for surprises of truths. It’s the type of art that looks me straight in the eyes, peers past them, and sweeps down into my inner world that calls to me. As it explores this world, the art asks me, with both innocence and guile, Hello, little world who are you?