Maggie Rogers

Growing up, Maggie Rogers learned to play the harp when she was just 7 years old, then turned her attention to playing guitar and banjo, impressing high school classmates with covers of Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead.

Rogers recorded her first album, The Echo, in a broom closet at her college, New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.

When she presented her song "Alaska" to Pharrell Williams during a masterclass with students at NYU, the performance nearly moved the producer to tears. A video of a visibly moved Williams listening to the tune was posted on Reddit, which subsequently went viral. "I started getting a lot of texts," Rogers recalled to Rolling Stone. "I didn't even know what Reddit was."