Maisie Peters creates whole universes within her music. It’s where her daydreams play out and her relationships are recalibrated; where people become objects of anger, lust and, more often than not, make believe. The 22-year-old British singer-songwriter has been doing this since she was 15. “You have a lot of power to make the world that you want,” Maisie says of her songwriting. This is especially true of her sophomore album, The Good Witch, due for release on 23 June. “I would argue that this album is true, but it’s my truth. The way I saw it.”
Each of the record’s 15 songs is shaped by an emotional turbulence with Maisie at its centre, its scatty storyteller. Such a position has always come naturally, she insists, digging up her A-Level coursework on her phone’s Google Docs app to show me. “‘Compare how The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye present the unreliability of narrators and the impact this has on a reader’,” she says, relaying her essay title and laughing. “I chose to write about that and now I’ve become a full-time unreliable narrator.”
Maisie is currently undergoing a period of metamorphosis, shedding the chrysalis of her successful and searingly personal debut album, You Signed Up For This. That record, released in 2021, was her breakout moment. Supported by her label boss Ed Sheeran, who signed her to his Gingerbread Man Records imprint shortly before the pandemic; Taylor Swift, who told her followers she was a “huge fan” in 2020; and a legion of young followers – you’ll spot them outside her shows, hours before stage time, queueing – the album came close to topping the UK charts. It was held off only by Kanye West’s surprise drop, DONDA.
“I’ve completed that cycle,” Maisie says now. “I’m about to be in a new era. I feel personally like I’m in that as well.” This weekend, she’ll play the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury and is due to headline Wembley Arena later in the year.
Graduating from bedroom pop artist to certified popstar is a mirror of Maisie’s own evolution from girlhood to womanhood. “I’ve been making music since I was 15,” she says. “So it’s only the last year or so that I’ve been a female musician who’s a woman.” It was her burgeoning love of songwriting that kick-started her career. As a young teenager, Maisie uploaded her original music to YouTube accompanied by charming homemade music videos. She, like Ed Sheeran, cut her teeth busking in her closest city, Brighton, before being spotted by BBC Introducing and Atlantic Records. With a record deal signed, Maisie proceeded to cultivate her fervent fanbase with each new track that dropped.
Her rise to pop stardom has been fuelled by that fanbase; you can spot them a mile off. They are mostly young women between their early teens and mid-twenties, who hear the subjects Maisie sings about — unrequited love, sisterhood, scorning men who’ve done wrong — and gel with it instantly. She writes from the Swift playbook, her lyrical prose cutting so close to home that fans see themselves in what she writes. But if Taylor Swift is deified, Maisie is more on their level.
Having once been in their position as part of “the Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson and Sara Bareilles fandom”, you’ll find Maisie on Twitter replying to in-jokes and dropping hints for forthcoming projects. “They find such a community within [the music],” she says of her fans. “I’m so lucky to make music for people who are smart, funny and engaged.”
For all its pop-produced buoyancy, The Good Witch is underscored by a sense of melancholy. “I just think so much of this album is me wishing I could have something back that doesn’t exist anymore,” Maisie says. It’s a conundrum that she’s pondered with friends: if you’re longing for something that’s no longer real, “what did we even want [in the first place]?” That almost unflattering sense of honesty — a craving for a non-existent subject — is an innate quality that serves Maisie well across her work.
“There’s the real-life person and then the person you’ve made in your head. Sometimes those are closer, sometimes they’re further away,” she says, citing the unhinged track “BSC” as an apt summary. On it, she sings: “I can write you out the way I write you in.” That confident narration, Maisie says, partly stems from her adoration for writer Joan Didion. “I was really inspired by the way she writes,” she notes, scrolling through her reading list. She cites a pull-quote on one of Didion’s books – “Joan Didion wastes no bullets” – as a core reference for the visuals of the album, asking her creative team to help her channel that quote’s energy. “There’s a literary candle burning in everything I do,” she says.
The album poetically traverses a kind of otherworldliness. On “History of Man”, Maisie tries and fails to unravel the patriarchy’s tangled grasp on the stories of women (“I’ve tried to re-write it but I can’t/it’s the history of man”); the atmospheric “Wendy” gives an alternative angling on the story of the kids who ventured to Neverland (“What about my wings? / What about Wendy?” she laments).
“I believe so intensely in the magic and power of music,” Maisie says, earnestly. One dreary night, I attended one of her live shows. As if a spell had been cast over the room, her fans were gathered in covens, arms around each other, belting Maisie’s lyrics in unison like a chant from somewhere deep within their souls. Maisie conducted this outpouring of emotion from the stage. It felt like she had grown; truly entered into her new era. Standing on stage, she wore a top embroidered with words she herself had written: ‘The universe is shifting, and it’s all for me.’
‘The Good Witch’ is out on 23 June. Pre-order it here.
Credits
Photography Alice Moitié