Virtually famous: Maggie Rogers

It’s an problem that I’ve faced a few times but doesn’t tend to happen to most of us: being forced to listen to a brand new song while the person who wrote it is sitting right beside you – awkward!

So it was for Pharrell Williams when he came to critique students’ music in a masterclass at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute in New York earlier this year – until the prolific hitmaker sat with Maggie Rogers from Maryland to listen to her song Alaska.

You can watch the grin slowly spreading across his face in a video that has now been seen over two million times on YouTube. “I have zero notes for that,” he says as its light tribal beats and her emotional falsetto fade away. “I’ve never heard anyone like you before.”

Last week the song gained a proper video, its sparse mix of gentle folkiness and contemporary R&B now helped along by Rogers and friends marching through a field. That one raced to over 700,000 views in a few days – not bad for a brand new artist who’s set to win a lot more ears than Pharrell’s.