Rogers grew up in rural Easton, Md. Her father is a now-retired Ford dealer; her mother, a former nurse who introduced Rogers to Erykah Badu and Alanis Morissette, now works as an end-of-life doula. Rogers was writing songs by age 13; at 17, she produced and self-released her debut album, “The Echo,” which channeled the pastoral spirit of early Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens. The demos for that record helped her secure admission to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In New York, she played in multiple bands and “overdosed on live music”; during a semester abroad, she visited clubs in Paris and Berlin and fell in love with house and techno.

During this time, she also found herself unable to write songs, even as graduation loomed and her music-production classes demanded it. “All my teachers were really frustrated with me,” she said. She began seriously considering a career in music journalism as a fallback; she interned at Spin and Elle and worked as an editorial assistant to the writer Lizzy Goodman, transcribing hundreds of hours of interviews with the leading lights of the early 2000s New York indie-rock boom for Goodman’s oral history “Meet Me in the Bathroom.”

Then in March 2016, during the second semester of Rogers’s senior year, Pharrell Williams — an artist-in-residence at N.Y.U. at the time — visited her music-production class to critique student work. Rogers brought a demo of “Alaska,” on which her supple soprano bobs and weaves over a sparse shuffle beat that brings to mind Williams’s own work with producing partner Chad Hugo as the Neptunes.