Telling Stories: Maisie Peters Interviewed

A glimpse behind her dreamy naivety...

Maisie Peters was destined to be a songwriter. The Brightonian singer has been spinning brilliantly observational tales from a young age, after falling in love with the conversational nature of Lily Allen and Taylor Swift in her early teens.

“I would start countless stories. I’d get really into it and I would do a couple of pages and then be like, ‘Fuck this, I can’t be bothered to write a book,’” she remembers fondly. “Then I discovered that songwriting is basically like writing a tiny book; it’s only a page and arguably you get to repeat half of it every other paragraph!”

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Maisie had found her calling. Aged just 15, she started uploading her songs, which she describes as having “too many words in them”, to YouTube. Three years later, in the midst of taking her A-Levels, she was signed to Atlantic Records. And within the last nine months, she’s gone from selling out her first London show at small, 320-person venue Omeara, to maxing out the 2,000-capacity Shepherd’s Bush Empire.

Just the other month month, YouTube placed her on their music Ones To Watch list for 2020. Her 2019 has been a whirlwind: “I don’t have a base,” she declares. “I just constantly have a little suitcase but it makes sense to be rootless for the minute.”

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Now 19, her music has flourished from dreamily naive on her debut 2017 single, ‘Place We Were Made’, to clever, witty pop that falls somewhere between the bittersweet emotional gut punch of Emily Burns and Clara Mae’s stripped-back introspections, channelling the endorphin rush of Sigrid’s pop anthemia. As we talk today she chats a mile a minute with a self-deprecating demeanour that is thoughtful and frequently hilarious, although she recognises that with her new EP, ‘It’s Your Bed Babe, It’s Your Funeral’, she’s hitting her stride.

“It’s is a more confident version of myself,” she says. “It’s a combination of my new music being out and learning how to finesse my show. I feel now my live shows are a great reflection of me as a person. I feel like it’s worth a ticket. Shepherd’s Bush was this cool moment where everything came together.”

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Words: Dannii Leivers
Photography: Joel Smedley

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