From Bethesda Magazine: A conversation with singer-songwriter Maggie Rose
Grammy nominee from Potomac discusses her music career, motherhood
By Mike Unger
April 15, 2026 10:48 a.m. | Updated: April 15, 2026 10:55 a.m.
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Make a ContributionMaggie Rose’s rise to acclaim in the music world has been methodical, not meteoric. Blessed with an angelic voice, the singer, who was raised in Potomac, harbors an outwardly fearless ambition that led her to drop out of college and move to Nashville to chase her dreams. Although success eventually followed, she wasn’t an overnight sensation; there were plenty of speed bumps along the way. But nearly two decades after arriving, Rose, 37, has become a fixture in Music City’s music scene—and beyond.
Despite all that, when she returns to Montgomery County, she’s not even the biggest star in her own family. That distinction would go to her son, Graham, who was born in April 2025. During a recent interview with Bethesda Magazine at Old Angler’s Inn, the historic Potomac restaurant just a few miles from where she grew up, Graham was being tended to by another person Rose feels endlessly fortunate to have in her life: her husband and manager, Austin Marshall. Her nostalgia for the restaurant runs especially deep because it’s where she played one of her first solo gigs in the area after moving to Nashville, where she still lives. Even though there was a pretty good crowd that day, it was a far cry from the thousands who pack the Tennessee city’s legendary Grand Ole Opry, where she has performed more than 100 times.
Still, she always cherishes coming home, no matter where her career takes her.
“In the earlier years, there was a bittersweet edge to it because I felt like I was returning to a life that I had diverged from,” she says of visiting Montgomery County. “I always have felt very strong, resounding support from my community here, but I’d chosen such a different path from what a lot of my friends had chosen. Now I think that people have a better grasp on what it is that I’m doing and that this hard work is paying off. They feel like it’s their victory to share when a lot of these good things happen.”
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About
NAME: Maggie Rose
FROM: Potomac
LIVES IN: Nashville, Tennessee
AGE: 37
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HIGH SCHOOL: Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School
OCCUPATION: Singer-songwriter
FAMILY: Husband, Austin Marshall; son, Graham
Happen they have. In 2024, Rose’s album No One Gets Out Alive was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Americana Album category. Rolling Stone named it one of the best albums of 2024. Although she didn’t win, the Grammy nomination brought new recognition to her poignant songwriting and soulful singing. Another Grammy nomination in 2025, this time for Best Americana Performance for the duet “Poison In My Well” with Grace Potter, followed without a win. Rose has performed with the Nashville Symphony, at such A-list events as the Newport Folk Festival and Austin City Limits, and on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
It’s been a wild ride for Rose, who was born Margaret Rose Durante. And she never forgets that it started in the place she’s sitting right now.
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“I know that I wouldn’t have fallen in love with singing or pursued it at all,” she says, “if I hadn’t had the community that I had growing up.”
Bethesda Magazine spoke with Rose at Old Angler’s Inn in November. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Did people think you were crazy to so vigorously pursue a career in music at such a young age?
I think there was definitely an ‘Oh, she’s taking a big swing’ kind of mentality about it. But people really enjoyed when I shared my ability to sing with them. Every sleepover we went to, every big get-together we’d have, all my friends would be like, ‘Margaret, you have to sing something.’ I tried out for American Idol when I was 16. I barely made the age cutoff. And I remember everyone just kind of rallying around me and hoping that that would have panned out.
How far did you get in American Idol ?
I think I had my bracelet cut in the first round. I was singing Mariah Carey’s ‘Always Be My Baby.’ I was sleeping on the Washington, D.C., convention center floor, with my parents taking shifts. And the guy basically said to me, ‘Come back next year. You just look like a baby.’ And I did at the time.
It was probably fortuitous that that didn’t happen because I got to forge my own path. I have mixed feelings about all of those programs anyway in terms of what they do to the contestants and the artists and the binding deals that they enter into.
I feel like I’ve had a guardian angel looking over me throughout my entire time since moving to Nashville. Things that felt like disappointments initially have allowed me to have much more freedom and control over my career. The music I’m making is a little bit left of center of what you typically would consider music from Nashville to be, but it’s proven to be a very sustainable career for me. I’ve just continued to be able to tour and release albums, and I’m finishing my fifth studio full-length album [scheduled to be released this summer]. Having that staying power, I think, is because things were very intentional after a certain point.
When did you realize that you had this great voice?
I was really little. I remember as a 3-year-old having the power to silence a room of adults. There’s something physical about making this big sound that feels really fulfilling, and I crave it. I think the support of the people around me growing up made me realize that was something special.
Did you grow up in a musical household?
I can’t say that my family members are musical in the sense that they are singers or players, but they are very celebratory about music. There is music always playing in the house—good music, too. My mom loved the Beatles, the Stones, the Judds, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bonnie Raitt. We were big fans of Frank Sinatra. I also feel like I grew up in a time where female vocalists were reigning supreme. We had the Chicks, Shania, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston. Everywhere I looked, I felt like female voices were celebrated.
Do you remember the first song that you wrote?
Yes, I do. There’s a song called ‘One Way Love.’ Now that I’m not as harshly critical of my previous self, I think there’s a really great sense of melody in it. It’s a song about unrequited love. There’s a lot of passion in the writing of that first song, and I’m proud of that aspect of it, but I will probably never play it or share it with anybody.
As a teenager you performed frequently with a Bruce Springsteen tribute band called the B Street Band. Was that your first experience in an ensemble?
Yes. That’s what allowed me to start writing original music, because I had this group of musicians who were able to help me bring the most elementary-sounding songs to life. I left the Springsteen material to them mostly because Glenn Stuart, who recently passed away, was the front man and he had the stance down. He looked exactly like Bruce Springsteen. He had it covered.
The B Street Band allowed me to sneak in some originals to see how the crowd reacted—if they’d put down their beer for a second and look over. I was also wearing a little sundress and didn’t even know how to stand onstage. That was my crash course into having a presence; before I had this initiation into live performing, I looked at singing like something that had to be technically very perfect and pretty and coiffed. I realized that singing perfectly and hitting all those technical points is like 20% of performing.
You dropped out of Clemson University and moved to Nashville when you were 19 years old. Was that a scary decision?
Yeah. Being young and stupid, you thought you had made it kind of at that point. My parents are very sensible, supportive people. Both my sisters are attorneys. I think that probably was a shock to them. They probably were not sleeping for months. But they at least presented a facade that they were totally confident in me.
I felt like I had to grow up really fast because I was 19 and all of a sudden everyone else in the room was 35 or older. Nashville was a very different town than it is now. It’s become much more diverse, and the music scene has widened tremendously, which is one of the reasons that I feel like I’m allowed to do what I do musically.
How did meeting Tommy Mottola, the music business icon, factor into your decision?
Tom Natelli [president and CEO of the Gaithersburg-based Natelli Communities real estate development firm, who along with his wife, Karen, helped finance Rose’s career] had a friend who kind of casually knew Tommy from some vacation property that they both have. I reached out to Tommy to see if he would listen to my demos, and we must have just hit him on a good day or he must have heard that raw talent that I suppose was there, because he called me when I was on my way to class at the beginning of my sophomore year and invited me to come perform these songs for him in his office, which was above Bergdorf [Goodman in New York City]. And I remember just being like, ‘OK, this is crazy. I’ll go perform for him.’ And he liked it enough. He was a liaison for me to meet all these people in Nashville that I worked with for the first couple of years of my career.
We all look back at our earlier work and see it through a different lens. When you revisit your first album, Cut to Impress, what are your thoughts of it now?
I’m proud of it. I really cared about making the best body of work that I could at that time. But I also didn’t have free rein to do what I wanted to do creatively. There were so many rules that I had to bend to in that space. And I think that that persists with country music as it pertains to country radio.
Shortly after that album came out in 2013, in an interview with American Songwriter you said that you were in the process of learning to play guitar. Where are you in that process now?
I’m still taking lessons from the same woman. I took a long hiatus when I was touring so intensively over the last couple of years, but we resumed probably a year and a half ago. I feel much more capable. I mean, I’m not trying to shred, necessarily. Although I did just get my first 335 hollow body Gibson guitar. I want to be able to, in any scenario, have a song that I want to present and feel self-sufficient enough to do so.
And also for songwriting. Some of the best songs that I’ve written, in my opinion, have been after I’ve just had a guitar lesson. But I have really great, talented bandmates, and at this juncture I’m not trying to be the lead guitarist in my band.
Is songwriting a process that you relish, fear, or does it fall somewhere in between?
I love it. I’ve just finished the tracking for my next album, and I feel like all the songs I wrote within this six-month time period were gifts, you know?
It’s also cyclical. You might be on tour or you might be having a baby or helping someone else with their songs. But I feel like it is a muscle, and you have to use it and make many attempts and just accept that many of those attempts will yield mediocre songs. It’s not a lost day’s work though. It’s just getting your reps in.
One of the songs for this next record I wrote two days before I had my son. My husband was like, ‘I don’t know if you need to be going out of the house to write a song when he’s going to be born in two days.’ But what else am I going to do? This is such a vibrantly creative time. The day I wrote it I was so full of emotion and hormones. It was pouring out of me. After he was born, you are like, ‘Oh, these were the little songwriting angels that were helping you get exactly what you wanted.’ It’s a song that perfectly embodies all the conflicting emotions you’re having, of fear and anxiety and excitement and love and inadequacy and vulnerability. It’s all mashed together. Without songwriting, I don’t know that there would have been a conduit for me to get out all that intensity I was feeling that day.
What’s the name of that song?
It’s called ‘Half Moon.’ And he was born under a full moon. It’s about the waxing and waning of being a woman, and who am I going to be after he’s born? A lot of the album is about that because I started it when I was pregnant.
Your husband, Austin, is also your manager. How did you two meet?
We met in Nashville. We got engaged at the Bethesda Theater, actually, during one of my shows. I met him through music. He was managing a songwriter in Nashville at the time. We started dating pretty quickly. I brought him home to meet my family like a month after we started dating. They were big fans of his.
Where did the inspiration for your album No One Gets Out Alive come from?
This was the post-pandemic album. Our livelihoods as touring artists were threatened like so many industries. There was that terrible stress of, Are we ever going to be able to resume in a way like we had before?
No one was telling me to make this record. I didn’t have a record label at the time. It was just something that I felt like I had to do. And my friend … who I grew up with, her father was terminally ill with esophageal cancer. He passed away. It happened … like that. It felt like time to make something beautiful and just go for it. And that’s why it’s very symphonic and we had these beautiful string arrangements on it. It was one of those examples of all these songs just kind of coming together quickly because I was feeling that inspiration and that pull to tell a story.
Why do you think it was your breakthrough?
I think there’s lots of honesty in it. This was really my pivot from commercial country to this more Americana, adult contemporary pop route. I’ve been making music for such a long time that it takes people awhile to slowly recalibrate, to be like, ‘Oh, OK, this is the lane that she’s in.’ And there’s still understandably questions about what genre this is. That’s something that I think so many artists deal with, especially if you’re going to stick around and keep making music for a long time. You’re going to want to evolve and change.
How did you find out that you’d been nominated for your first Grammy?
I was pregnant and had just been dropped by the label I had released No One Gets Out Alive with three months after the album came out. It was some pretty devastating stuff. It’s one of those things that you think is the end of the world but actually ends up being the best thing that could have happened.
Austin and I submitted for the Grammys without a label. We just were like, ‘Hey, let’s keep swinging for the fences.’ I was on a hike, and I got a call from Austin after I just had all these texts coming through because I had it on do not disturb. We both started crying. It was really special.
When did you start noticing that people were noticing you and your work?
There’s always been a really great community that’s stuck with us. There’s even people who discovered me from Cut to Impress who’ve been riding the wave of all these changes.
You get these compliments like, ‘You’re the best-kept secret in Nashville.’ You’re like, ‘Oh, thanks. Kind of. I’m trying really hard to not be.’ But there’s people in the industry who’ve been pulling for me for a long time. The Americana Music Association gave me a nomination for Emerging [Act] of the Year, which we all laughed about because we’re like, ‘It’s not new artists, best new artists, it’s emerging artists.’ I think that distinction is important because it’s been a really big couple of years where I think people are understanding this music.
Your first child, Graham, was born in April. In November you released a TEDx Talk titled ‘Motherhood Isn’t a Transformation—It’s an Activation.’ What did you mean by that?
Getting dropped by the label, thinking that everything was collapsing around me and that my favorite album was going to be totally cannibalized by what had happened could have led to some destructive behavior. I seriously believe that knowing that I was going to be a mother made me recommit to my music, made me take the best care of myself, made me make sure I was surrounded by people who were going to make me the best version of myself.
It was all these things I should have been doing without knowing that he was coming. I think we should be mothering ourselves that way, regardless if there’s a baby on the way. We should prioritize creating an environment that we would want to bring a child into or someone that we love so deeply, which should be yourself.
That was the gist of this talk, but it was also a lot about how this industry, like so many, is not conducive to easing the burden of a working mother. I was so nervous before, because I was like, ‘Who am I to give a TED Talk?’
Did you have that memorized? Because it didn’t look like you were reading off teleprompters.
No, they don’t let you, which I found out maybe a little late into the commitment. You have to have it memorized; you don’t want anything in your hands. And I had to sing in between. So I was trying to remember, OK, when does the song happen? I can’t just blaze through that. But I’m so happy I did it. It’s fun to do hard things. And that was one of the hardest things I’ve done.
Do you sing to Graham?
All the time.
What do you sing to him?
I practice guitar in front of him a lot, which has actually helped my practicing habits because he’s such a great listener. He’s very mesmerized by this instrument. He loves the ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider.’ He loves a lot of the songs from No One Gets Out Alive, which is interesting because I’m sure he heard them constantly in utero because I was touring the whole time. I sing ‘Sweet Symphony,’ which is the Joy Oladokun song that she does with Chris Stapleton. He really loves that one.
He just loves music. His bath time music is Real Jazz on SiriusXM. Sometimes I got to catch him at the right time, though, before I belt out a tune. You got to meet your audience where they are. At night, he’s ready to party a little bit.
You’ve had the opportunity to perform with such legends as Vince Gill and Grace Potter. Do you have one pinch yourself moment where you found yourself doing something you couldn’t believe you were doing?
Years ago I was invited to a charity golf tournament that Bill Murray holds with his brothers in St. Augustine, Florida. We’ve been the house band, and I was singing, and I remember looking over and Bill Murray just like creeps onstage and starts doing this crazy dance. He’s a good singer and obviously a great entertainer. We’ve kind of become friends through this tournament over the years.
The stories you hear about him showing up at a party and doing dishes, those are true. I was in New York City one time, and it was the first time I had a music video playing on a TV in Times Square. I went to lunch with Austin and [Murray’s] brother John. I turned around and there was Bill. He had lunch with us, and then he was gone.
You followed No One Gets Out Alive with the EP Cocoon. Where did the inspiration for that project come from?
From Graham. It was all written, recorded and released around his birth. The title suggests a lot of things: the cocoon, the transformation, the metamorphosis and the emergence after. But it’s also wanting to just be still for a moment and quiet, which is not something that we get to do. It was a little snapshot of a beautiful moment that I wanted to have and document
through music.
Each December you play shows at the Bethesda Theater. Are those more meaningful for you because you’re back home?
They’re like their own special breed of show because we do our set of originals, but there is a segment that is set aside for Christmas music. There’s something so nostalgic about Christmas music and being able to perform it on a stage where I got engaged, in front of my sisters and my parents and my friends. We do two nights in a row, so whether I spend Christmas in Maryland or not that year, I still get to see so many people that I love, that I grew up with. Also, people who have become fans in D.C. are part of the family now, even though I didn’t know them before I started making music.
Mike Unger is a writer and editor who grew up in Montgomery County and lives in Baltimore.
This appears in the March/April 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine