somewhere between lost and reborn

a record update + the summer reading list I promised you

2 July 2026

Everything before 2020, I remember in a straight line. Everything after I remember as a spiral. This strange post-covid non-linearity. I’m back in my studio again after six years. Just me and my laptop and my synths and my piano. My hair is long and curled by ocean water again. The summer sun has brought my freckles to the surface. For the first time in a long time, I look the same as I did then, in the before. And it feels nearly the same. Like I could fold together two pieces of paper and they’d make a complete image, the middle disappearing altogether.

It’s a strange full circle moment. I feel somewhere between lost and reborn. Writing and writing and writing. Tinkering with songs. Clarifying the vision and going over it once again. Dropbox folders within Dropbox folders. Different versions of the same thing with the hope that one arrangement shift might crack the code.

But I’m trying. Stepping away from the drawing board, turning around, going back again. Asking myself to be brave. Re-learning real, honest vulnerability after ten years in the public eye. I want to say something true. I want to make something urgent and essential. I want to make something that makes me feel.

That’s the music update. It had been a while, so I felt I owed you one. “Owe” is a funny word, but you are very much with me, both within the work and alongside me, on this journey. I’ve written…so many songs. The weight of them is piling up within my arms. I carry them around with me everywhere I go. And I think I’ve got a few more to write. Being a great writer is also being a great editor.

There are mood boards. I’ll show you one day. For the first time ever, there have been multiple titles (This is usually the thing that I have first — even before the music – it sticks, and it doesn’t change. But this album, instead, has been ever-evolving and I’m allowing space for that.) A friend said to me recently, “This album has a birthday.” That was helpful to hear. A sense of pre-destination. The work we create is always creating us. I am renewing my artistic vows. I am choosing to have faith.

Meteor Shower, Mia Bergeron (2025)

And in the meantime, I am reading. I wrote to you last week asking for summer reading suggestions, and no surprise you are all voracious readers with excellent taste. I asked you for the profound, the page turners, the spiritual, and the smutty — and you delivered.

For a quick refresh…

You can find the Heard It In A Past Life recommended reading list — HERE

You can find the Surrender recommended reading list — HERE

These lists were often the books that I was reading alongside making the album. The input that accompanied the output. The research. The meditation on a theme. Don’t Forget Me was written and recorded so quickly (…5 days), that there wasn’t a reading list. It didn’t feel right.

Here are some books I’ve read recently and loved–

• Transcription by Ben Lerner

• The Glorians by Terry Tempest Williams

• The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

• Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch

• Chain of Ideas by Ibram X. Kendi

• The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy

• Heart the Lover by Lily King

• A World Appears by Michael Pollan

• Famesick by Lena Dunham

• The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan

• In A World of Sunrises by Cleo Wade

• Life by Keith Richards

Here are some faves I’d give a friend for vacation–

• Circe by Madeline Miller

• Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

• On Writing by Stephen King

• The Girls by Emma Cline

• Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

• The Uncool by Cameron Crow

• Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins-Reid

• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

• I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally

• The Women by Kristin Hannah

• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Here’s what’s on my summer reading list (complete with your suggestions)–

• Art Work by Sally Mann

• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

• Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

• Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

• On The Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle

• Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton

• A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros

• Whistler by Ann Patchett

• Outline by Rachel Cusk

• Kin by Tayari Jones

• Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

I should note that you recommended a lot of my classic forever faves, so I didn’t put them on my list, but we are very much aligned. Specifically, many of you are reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden, which I read and loved during the tour for Now That The Light is Fading. That one marks a very specific time in my life.

I’m also just going to say it…as I was researching, I couldn’t help thinking… wow, so many of these books have terrible covers. Like, awful. I am BEGGING the literary industry to hold cover design to a higher standard. No AI, just human hands. No more pastel landscapes or candy-colored fonts. No more books that look like bottles of cheap white wine. Yes, I judge a book by its cover. And if you need more convincing that you should too, go read Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness.

That’s all for now. If you need me, you’ll know where to find me…making beats and drudging up my depths at the piano…on my own and reading by the sea.

Yours,

Maggie