Tenacious Talent

The music industry knocks down more than it lifts up. But for Maggie Koerner, a bluesy singer/songwriter who has done more than her fair share of time in the trenches of the music machine, talent was never in question and neither was tenacity. A Shreveport native with a fascination with the vocal gymnastics of Meat Loaf and the crooning of Richard Marx, Maggie faced adversity at a young age, when she was removed from church for being too effective a performer.

“I was kicked out of a Catholic mass once for a solo,” recalls Maggie. “I got applause from the audience, and you can’t do that, so the priest kicked me out. Even at that age, I was writing my melodies and lyrics. That helped me realize I was pretty good at this.”

Maggie made the jump to New Orleans to find her musical family, which she surely did with Revivalists lead vocalist David Shaw and New Orleans late-night funk band Galactic. Her years of musical experimentation and growth would give rise to her first studio album, “The Bartholomew Songs” — 11 tracks of Maggie’s soul laid twitching on the operator’s table. Brassy, bold and deeply felt, the album is an odyssey of an artist cresting to a new supernova built around the rhythmic simplicity and pipe organ swoon of the single “If I Die.” Maggie was surely on her way, with a sound and an album ready to take the world by storm on a grand multi-city tour. Sadly, this was in February 2020, and it looked as if these songs would never be heard.

“The album was originally supposed to be self-titled and released through Concord, but during COVID, they wanted to shelve it. Those songs were my children that I never had. They mattered,” says Maggie. “I got them back after two years, but it was stressful to release them. Some songs were from nearly a decade before, when I lived at a house on 714 Bartholomew Street in New Orleans. They were a portrait of that time, so that it felt fitting to rename the album around that.”

Pulling the Band-Aid of releasing her long-awaited album was a massive milestone for Maggie, a starting pistol for a creative output both fruitful and prolific. Invigorated by the idea that her best song is the one she has yet to write, Maggie began to embrace art for art’s sake with people who make her life feel whole alongside her fluffy support dog and best friend, Tom.

“There was a time when I believed my first album would never be released, so I decided to just start writing and get back to who I was as a songwriter,” says Maggie. “That feeling of sitting quietly alone in your kitchen with an idea and your dog, there’s an intimacy involved that I have always been comfortable with. Now I have at least three albums’ worth of songs, and the world is my oyster.”

The initial byproduct of that is called “Upstate,” her new album set to be released, described as a sweet little album of indie rock, soul variety; the exact kind of sound that Maggie herself wants to listen to. Not only growing as a singer/songwriter but as a person, surviving an onslaught of obstacles, Maggie is more creatively vibrant than ever, ready to continue producing her own music and dreaming of an all-female super group. As the world continues to shift and warp unnaturally, voices like hers matter most; those that offer the audience their whole soul, belted as loudly and proudly as possible.

“If COVID taught me anything, it’s that nothing matters but that Nina Simone quote, ‘An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times’,” says Maggie. “I was never put here to be a pop star. For me, it’s about reminding folks why we’re here on this Earth, even if it’s just to feel good and cry.”