Charlie Garner – Staff Writer

avg6206@psu.edu

Maisie Peters is a 22 year old British singer-songwriter who started off just uploading her songs onto her YouTube channel in 2015. These videos gathered thousands of views and she gained quite a bit of a following on the platform. In 2017, she released “Place We Were Made,” which was her first single, and “Birthday.” The songs gained popularity on Spotify in the indie-pop circle and Peters eventually signed with Atlantic Records UK after she was gaining momentum. She released more singles and two EPs, “Dressed Too Nice for a Jacket” and “It’s Your Bed Babe, It’s Your Funeral,” with these releases being more popular in the mainstream. 

In the year 2020, Maisie Peters had a song released as a part of the “Birds of Prey” movie soundtrack called “Smile” and was announced as the opening act for Niall Horan’s European part of his tour “Nice To Meet Ya.” The tour was, unfortunately, canceled due to COVID-19. About a year later, Peters left Atlantic Records and signed with Ed Sheeran’s label, Gingerbread Man Records. She then released her debut album, “You Signed Up For This,” in August of 2021. The album, specifically the first two singles “John Hughes Movie” and “Psycho” showed up on the British charts. Peters moved away to a cottage in the summer of 2020, where she started composing for the record. The album’s final song to be completed was “Psycho,” in which Ed Sheeran was one of the co-writers. In my opinion, the best song on that album is “Talking to Strangers,” which is a truly underrated track of hers that can either be deciphered as a love song or a breakup song.  The album blends bouncy synths with catchy lyrics and melodies, but it also has an acoustic background, keeping the sound the fans have grown to know and love. However, it is apparent that this album marks a stride into her career as an artist and that it was not merely a collection of random ideas. The songs transition from angry anthems to gentle ballads, each as strengthening as the last. 

She joined Ed Sheeran for his last tour in 2022 as his opening act and released the following singles while on tour: “Cate’s Brother,” “Blonde,” “Good Enough,” and “Not Another Rockstar.” And all of those singles gathered popularity on TikTok. She has recently put out two other singles, “Body Better” and “Lost the Breakup,” as a part of her new sophomore album “The Good Witch” that is coming out on June 16, 2023. A good portion of Maisie Peters’s songs are about relationships, but her songwriting is very unique and the storytelling on all of her songs is something you don’t really hear in modern pop music, especially in the mainstream. For just being in her early 20s, Maisie Peters has made quite the name for herself and I am pretty excited to see the things she will do in her music career.