Want Want

Album: Surrender (2022)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Want Want" is a sensual declaration of lust and desire where after some initial apprehension, Rogers gives in to her feelings.

    If you want-want what you want-want, then you want it
    Can't hide what you desire once you're on it
  • Maggie Rogers initially wrote "Want Want" with one of her old bandmates, Del Water Gap (aka S. Holden Jaffe) during quarantine. They penned it in a small studio assembled over Rogers' parents' garage in Maine. "It was really just about the fun of it all," she said. "Some bubblegum world to escape to in the middle of the isolation and darkness."

    Over the next year and a half, Rogers edited and re-edited with producer Kid Harpoon (Florence + the Machine, Harry Styles) until they found "the perfect knock-your-teeth-out drums, the right growl of the guitar tone."
  • Though the roaring synth is just a stock sound from a Prophet-5 synthesizer, it reminded Rogers of the intro to "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath. "The right amount of bite that still invites you in," she said.
  • Warren Fu shot the video at a New York Koreatown karaoke bar. It is one of Rogers' favorite karaoke bars. "Sticky floors and fluorescent lit bathrooms," commented the singer. "Everything in its right place."
  • We see Rogers dancing with wild abandon in the karaoke bar. In the past, she would have shied away from the sensuality of the lyric and her performance. "I came up in a pre-MeToo environment and I really was afraid of being sexualized and being degraded publicly," Rogers admitted to the BBC. "So I really squashed my sense of sexuality in order to protect myself."

    Warren Fu also directed Rogers' previous video for "That's Where I Am."
  • Rogers first performed "Want Want" live at the annual Coachella music festival on April 17, 2022. The singer originally planned on releasing the song in May 2022 but delayed it because of her graduation from Harvard Divinity School. Rogers eventually dropped it on June 1, 2022 as the second single from her Surrender album.

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