FEATURE:
Not Yet Two Weeks Ago
PHOTO CREDIT: Sonny McCartney
Spotlighting the Amazing Maisie Peters
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I have already spotlighted…
Maisie Peters but, as she played Glastonbury last week in a celebrated set, I thought it was a perfect time to celebrate her once more. For those in attendance, it was a magical experience down at Worthy Farm. It was a gig that gave her a perfect opportunity to showcase songs from her new album, The Good Witch. The second studio album from the West Sussex-born songwriter, it follows 2021’s debut, You Signed Up for This. I think that The Good Witch announces Peters as one of our finest young artists. Rolling Stone assessed her Glastonbury performance:
“The worst way to love somebody is to watch them love somebody else,” sings Maisie Peters during ‘Body Better’, the song that opens her set today on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.
Full of self-doubt, it’s a vulnerable way to begin her first ever appearance at Glastonbury but Maisie Peters thrives on creating heartfelt pop. Backed by a three-piece band, a fiery sense of purpose and a crowd that knows every word, ‘Body Better’ is quickly transformed from pained confession to jubilant anthem. There’s plenty more where that came from as well and by the end of her hour-long set, Peters has traded in heartbreak for something far more confident. “I’ll fuck your life up as a blonde,” she smirks during the giddy, ‘80s inspired ‘Blonde’.
Maisie Peters’ gigs often feel like a party but today, the singer has more to celebrate than usual. Her second album ‘The Good Witch’ came out at midnight and “what better place to see it in than the most magical place in the world,” she asks.
A “twisted” take on a break-up album, The Good Witch explores destruction, power and magic, without ever dwelling on sadness. There’s self-deprecation but also spiky empowerment and a giddy sense of fun. Today, Peters brings all of that, as well as a little bit of her own magic, to the Pyramid Stage.
‘Cate’s Brother’ is a sugary pop-punk track that feels purpose built for sunny fields, ‘Run’ is an urgent, indie-rock banger while the thunderous ‘Not Another Rockstar’ is introduced by Peters as being about her “terrible, terrible taste in men”. Halfway through the theatrical track, Peters pauses for a second to take in the ever-growing crowd. “The irony is, who’s the rockstar now?” she smiles.
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
Peters has clearly learnt a thing or two from touring stadiums with Ed Sheeran. She’s a master of crowd control and a majority of her set fills suitably grand, with the likes of ‘Villain’, ‘I’m Trying’ and ‘You’re Just A Boy (And I’m Kinda The Man)’ all sounding glorious on Glastonbury’s biggest stage.
There are moments of genuine intimacy as well though. A gorgeous, slow-burning ‘Worst Of You’ bubbles with emotion before ‘You Signed Up For This’ flickers between hope and heartache. ‘Brooklyn’ is sung for Peters’ sister as an apology for not bringing her a vape on-site while ‘John Hughes Movie’, a hammering song about unrequited love, is dedicated to the queer community. “I wouldn’t have the career I have without you,” she explains. “I feel very honoured to be a woman on the pyramid stage,” she adds a little later.
That ability to forge a connect from afar is clearly working as well. Fans hold up banners reading “We are the granddaughters of the witches you could not burn” which goes nicely with Peters’ own “Women’s hearts are lethal weapons” t-shirt. It’s little wonder she’s been fan-cast as support for Taylor Swift’s European ‘Eras’ tour next year.
Before the phenomenal snarl of ‘Lost The Break-Up’, one fan on the front tow hands Peters her very own broomstick. “What a good day to be a good witch” she grins. It’s early in the day, but this witch has cast the most magical spell over Worthy Farm”.
With similarities made to Taylor Swift, there is something about Maisie Peters that stands her aside from her peers. Making Pop that stays in the head but also stirs the soul, she is someone who is going to have a very long career. I will finish off with a review for The Good Witch. If you are new to Maisie Peters, I have looked at a few interviews online that will give you more depth and detail. There are a couple of interviews I want to bring in Teen Vogue in an interview published last week. We learn, even though Maisie Peters is not especially spiritual, music is as close to something divine and truly meaningful. It is incredible to see how far this wonderful artist has come in a relatively short time:
“She fell in love at an early age. Growing up in Steyning, a small town near the sea in West Sussex, England, where timber-framed buildings line quiet streets, Peters often escaped in the velvety pages of fictional stories. She'd bend the spines and mark the margins of her most sacred texts, The Twilight Saga and The Great Gatsby. Never a fan of being read to, she preferred to move at her own voracious pace. She started writing short stories and poetry in primary school, skills that naturally developed into songwriting as she began curating her taste. She'd pore over the lyric booklets of her favorite albums — Lily Allen's Alright, Still, Florence and the Machine's Lungs, ABBA Gold, and Taylor Swift's Fearless — enamored by their fanciful anecdotes and attention to detail. Despite having no formal music training, she'd make drum beats with her hands and fill her notebooks from cover to cover. When she was 12, she borrowed a friend's acoustic guitar and taught herself to play by watching YouTube videos.
"I was so obsessed," she recalls, "for no reason. It wasn't like I told my family, 'I want to be a singer. I want to be a writer. I want to be a pop star.' I had none of that. I just loved doing it… I wrote so much music and wanted it to go somewhere, but there was no big, grand plan."
Within a year, she had written hundreds of songs, the result of an overactive imagination; by 15, she had joined a band and started regularly busking on the street and performing at pubs, posting original songs on her YouTube page. Early cuts wallow in life's messiest bits, gentle melodies for tempestuous feelings, and a folksy lilt over wistful keys. "Waiting around, still halfway hopeful that you'll show," she sings on 2017's "Birthday," one of her first independently released singles. "You've said you'd call, of course you won't, I should've known."
PHOTO CREDIT: Alice Moitié
"I'm someone who writes music to remember," she shares over a plate of truffle fries. "A lot of why I write music is to chronicle and document. I think some people write music for catharsis, and that's not really my experience with it." She supposes the healing comes after, not for her but rather for the listener to bear. These "stamps of memory," as she calls them, frozen in time signatures, no longer belong to just her. "When you write music the only person that's relevant is yourself," she says. "You're very much in that moment. Then when you release it, it's really not about me at all, or even the person I wrote about. You can listen back to it, you can hear how you felt, but you can't really feel it anymore."
It's a lesson in Swiftian storytelling. It's crafting an image so lyrical and engaging that it places the listener alongside you in the room where it happened — the heartbreak, the disappointment, the love. Last year, Swift described a good song as something that "stays with you even when people or feelings don’t." Peters cites the Midnights mastermind as her "holy grail," her most formative influence. You can hear it in the way she sets a scene. "I am 20 and probably upset right now," she sings on the opening track of her debut album, You Signed Up For This, released under Ed Sheeran's Gingerbread Man Records in 2021. It's an affirmation of self-awareness, equal parts sincere and melodramatic. On "John Hughes Movie," she laments unrequited love over synthy melodies and elastic beats; "Boy," co-written by Sheeran, is a smooth kiss-off to a serial cheater in which she deliciously delivers the lyric "I could be a grown-up, but baby you know what / maybe I’ll release this song instead" with all the pettiness of a young woman scorned.
The Good Witch inhabits a similar space — broken hearts, bruised egos, and offbeat anthems — but Peters displays a heightened sense of introspection and emotional range. If You Signed Up For This was directed at you, the listener, then The Good Witch gazes inward. A breakup album at its core, she sees herself as the story's arcane narrator, both its playwright and its muse”.
I want to move to an interview with Rolling Stone UK. You can buy Maisie Peters’ The Good Witch. A fantastic listen, it shows a more ambitious and confident artist to the one we heard on the excellent You Signed Up for This. With music aimed at dreamers, romantics, and those living in a fantasy, there is something fantastical and magical about her music that is hard to ignore. I do think that we have in our midst an artist who will soon conquer the globe:
“Peters is building on what her idol — and now Maisie Peters fan — Taylor Swift spent 15 years establishing: that women can write pop songs about the insecure, the needy and, most pertinently, the hallucinatory space in which reality and fantasy meet. “I’m obsessed with the almost,” Peters says. “What you almost say, or almost do, or you almost had or almost lost. All of those moments, I think, make for interesting music and also feel very female as well, that whole experience.” She returns to something I previously mentioned about the impossibility of ever knowing if romantic interests obsess about you in the same way as you do them. “You said the word obsessed earlier and I realised when I was looking through my next album, ‘obsessed’ would be the biggest word on my word map. I think women are pretty private with their obsessions, apart from to other women maybe, and sometimes it’s funny because people are like, ‘Oh, you’re so obsessed.’ And you’re like, ‘You have no idea.’ This is the surface of the obsession.”
Later, when Peters plays her headline set at the venue, she will tell the room who she makes music for: the girls who got ghosted and still wish them ‘happy birthday’; the girls who bought gifts for their crush’s mother; the girls who got ditched by someone who was not their boyfriend. The list changes each night, depending on what comes to her in the hours beforehand. “I just think there’s such validity in those relationships, and sometimes they mean more to you than the ones you can define because you never quite had it, or you could never quite explain it,” she says.
PHOTO CREDIT: Emilia Paré
While making her upcoming album The Good Witch, Peters felt powerful. Some of it was written over the past year, firstly in Stockholm — an already magical place to her — with two other women (“we became almost like a coven”), and later in the forests in Suffolk. She cites destruction, femininity and benevolence as its themes. “My universe, in this album at least, is something for me to destroy and to build up again how I want to,” she says.
The first single, ‘Body Better’, is about a recent time she compared her body to another girl’s, deeming it hotter, categorically better. It was an ugly thought, she says, something she’s not proud of for thinking but assumes it will be relatable. She predicts it will be hard to talk about this song when she has to promote it and when fans approach her to ask about it. “I know I’m going to get people who think it’s wrong or bizarre of me to say. I’m well aware I have a lot of privilege, I’m a [UK] size 4 or 6 and white and blonde,” she says. “Equally, it was something that was true to me. I hope that by putting it into the world it is only a force for good.”
The support of the few women who have heard The Good Witch and loved it encourages her. In the weeks spent finalising this album, she’s been co-ruminating and testing ideas out with her female housemate who is increasingly invested in her favourite tracks making it onto the album. “When I tell her so-and-so on my team doesn’t like it, she’s like ‘Why? I don’t agree!’” Peters laughs.
It’s while relaying stories like this that she decides she has a final answer about who a Maisie Peters fan is. “If I were to summarise it, I’d say my music is for the quietly unhinged,” she says. “That’s who I make music for if I was gonna choose a blanket statement. The quietly unhinged… And maybe also the loudly, too — there’s no shame for being loudly unhinged either. I just think that there’s a whole subculture in the world of the quietly unhinged.” And then she goes downstairs to address her many quietly deranged girls in love”.
I am going to round up with a review for The Good Witch. Maisie Peters’ second studio album has won plenty of acclaim. This is what The Line of Best Fit sat down with an album that must rank alongside the best of this year. Peters is a remarkable songwriter who has a distinct style. Everyone needs to check her out. After a busy 2023 so far, the momentum will keep going for her. I am excited to see where she goes next:
“After a long stretch where barely discernible ‘mumble rap’ and hazy, languid R&B beats dominated the radio and tilted popular music, the pandemic has ushered in a new wave of feel-good, glittery pop. This year, Ava Max and Ellie Goulding shifted their style to this emphasis on fun, and TikTok-minted newcomers like Reneé Rapp and Mimi Webb have entered the ring as well.
Maisie Peters’ second album, The Good Witch, follows the same pattern: a solid album of dance-pop paired with the same bounciness and clarity that mid-2010s pop songs used to dominate the radio. Peters could have easily lapsed into forgettable lyrics, but often includes topics done in a smart way that pop music back then would have never touched: body dysmorphia and even gender switching to assert dominance (on one song she declares, “You’re just a boy, and I’m kinda the man.”)
Peters knows how to write a catchy song, and her voice is smart, sharp, and fitting for the digs that permeate the album. “Lost The Breakup” pares down a past relationship to a competition capable of winning, a race to see who can get out of it quicker, stronger, and better – much like MUNA’s recent “One That Got Away.” “Coming of Age” and “There It Goes” tracks self-development and assurance in oneself: “I am the Iliad,” she says on the former, “Of course you couldn’t read me.”
The album includes more tender moments, when Peters is at the opposite end of the breakup: “Watch” goes into pop-punk territory as she sees a former partner’s success (“You’re being a superstar and all I got are victim cards”); the peppy “Body Better” sees her in a moment of speculation and envy, wondering if she’s been dumped because a different girl has a nicer body than hers; “BSC” ditches the pretenses and manners, admitting how a relationship affected her. “You think I’m alright, but I’m actually motherfucking batshit crazy,” she sings, which narrowly loses the title of the album’s funniest line to “I am both Kathy Bates and Steven King,” appearing on the same song.
The record’s few missteps largely reprise themes or instrumental ideas that are too dated: “Two Weeks Ago” is an attempt at a power-pop ballad, and “Want You Back” has a better premise, but still sounds as if it’s plucked from ten years ago, right next to Rachel Platten’s inescapable “Fight Song.” “Therapy” too, is a little contrived, an unwelcome symptom from Instagram mental-health speak: “How come you’re taking me from your arms back into therapy?” she asks, without realising what’s discussed in that session might make for a better song topic.
The Good Witch is pleasant pop, a record that doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard while still cutting with witty writing. Peters has a fun side, but her creativity is evident in places like closer “History of Man,” which boasts topics most pop stars wouldn’t even think to write about, going back through history and discussing the gender differences between powerful men and women. “Women’s hearts are lethal weapons,” she says, “Did you hold mine and feel threatened?” Such is the story of a woman with smarts and heart to spare”.
Even if I have highlighted and written about Maisie Peters, that was around her debut album. Things have changed and moved on since then. One of the U.K.’s brightest and most accomplished young artists, I can see her doing big venues gigs like her idol, Taylor Swift. Not to be too readily compared, Peters has her own sound. She is someone who will inspire songwriters coming through. Only twenty-three, there are many years and decades ahead of her. We are very lucky to have…
THIS rather special artist.