MaisiePetersisEvolving

The singer-songwriter on memory, music and the making of Florescence

 

WORDS: Olive Walton

 

From school crushes to the imagined heartbreaks that shaped her earliest lyrics, Maisie Peters has always been fascinated by storytelling. Inspired by love stories she found in books and TV shows as a teenager, she began creating emotional worlds to write within long before she had lived them herself. Since then, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter has consistently written deeply reflective music – something that remains true on her upcoming album, Florescence.

 

Already one of the UK’s most celebrated young songwriters, Peters won the inaugural Rolling Stone UK Breakthrough Award in 2023 and later that year landed a No.1 album on the UK Official Albums Chart with The Good Witch, becoming the youngest British female solo artist in nearly a decade to do so. Following a whirlwind few years spent touring with artists including Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, alongside announcing her debut headline show at The O2 next year, Florescence marks a new chapter for the singer-songwriter.

 

Describing it as some of her most introspective work yet, Peters approaches Florescence with a new sense of clarity. Moving beyond the heartbreak that defined much of her earlier music, the album instead explores the vulnerability of happiness, the complexities of love and the quiet power of reflecting on the past from a new perspective. “It’s nice, it gives you space to reinterpret your life and also find a conclusion from things,” she says.

 

In conversation with Peters, we trace the journey back to where it all began: busking with friends as a teenager, uploading original songs to YouTube and writing endlessly after school inspired by books, fictional characters and the artists that first made her want to tell stories of her own. Reflecting on everything from disastrous touring moments and the chaos of early live shows to falling in love and learning how to embrace happiness in her songwriting, Peters looks back on the experiences that shaped her with the same honesty and self-awareness that has long defined her music. Unafraid to dissect her experiences of growing up and girlhood, Peters is a songwriter who translates deeply personal experiences into songs that feel universal, and with Florescence, that remains as true as ever.

 

Olive Walton:  You are stepping into a new era with Florescence and to mark the occasion, I wanted to revisit some of the previous eras of your life and dissect them. Could you share a feeling or a memory tied to these moments?

 

Number one: The busking era?

 

Maisie Peters: The busking era memory would be me going busking with two of my friends at the time and then going to a house party after we’d gone busking for the day and losing all of the money that we’d made at the house party. All of our like 60 pound coins. It was very dramatic when we were 16, 17 and £60 was all the money that we had made.

 

OW: The YouTube era?

 

MP: It just makes me think of filming videos in my house, trying to find a different location for the backdrop of my video and then doing a clap and I would look at my hands when I clapped to sync the audio of the video. I didn’t realise that everyone else just cut it out, so I kept it in all of my videos.

 

OW: The band era?

 

MP: The legendary moment of this time would be this tour that we went on around North America. It was our first tour bus tour and it was the first tour with me, Jack [drums], Tina [keys] and Joel [guitar] and we were on a tour bus around North America. We were playing all these tiny venues and we played this venue in Kilby Court. And the power went off on the whole street and so we had to use this crazy generator that was from a science fiction film, it was gonna kill us. We did this crazy gig basically in a shed in Kilby Court, Salt Lake City. That was also the first tour where Jack went from boy to man and he wore a cowboy hat every single day.

 

“the first time I met Ed [Sheeran]… we had dinner together in his secret pub and drank wine and wrote this funny song called Boy, a little bit drunk from the wine and it was iconic and it made the album.”

 

OW: The getting signed era?

 

MP: That makes me think of the first time I met Ed [Sheeran] when I went up to his place in Suffolk and we met and wrote together for the first time and I met his cats and I was very nervous, so I just really kept my eye on the cats. Then we wrote multiple songs, but one of them was called Hollow which was on my first album. Then we had dinner together in his secret pub and drank wine and wrote this funny song called Boy, a little bit drunk from the wine and it was iconic and it made the album.

 

OW: Tour era?

 

MP: So I remember one of the first tours I went on, I was 16 or 17, and I was playing these little shows in literally the back rooms of pubs. I really remember Paul, who was tour managing and driving and it was really just me, Paul and this keys player called Phoebe. He was driving us around and on that tour he showed me the Damien Rice album O and I fell in love with the album and I really remember driving around late night from one pub to another, listening to that Damien Rice album, just being so amazed by the music.

 

There was also one Coldplay show in Budapest where the speakers cut out and the sound stopped working and so I had to acoustically play the end of the song because the speakers stopped working. But even then, I remember we just had such a wonderful time and it was such a fun, beautiful, light-hearted period of life where even the literal speaker stopping working couldn’t knock us down. We were just happy to be there so we made do and did an acoustic performance. Then the speakers came back and it all carried on. I remember being really unruffled by that, it was still the best day ever.

 

OW: The MP3 era?

 

MP: Filming both those videos, the My Regards video and the album trailer was so memorable and were such fun, exciting days. When we were filming the My Regards music video, there was this tiny little scene where we’re behind a curtain and we pop out. It was only obviously Benny [Skinner] and I behind that curtain, and it was a relatively small space, so I got to feel his huge, huge biceps up close. It was just the two of us and it was super hot because there was a radiator in there. So we were both overheating behind this radiator, behind this curtain waiting to pop out and giggles were had in a big way. Giggles about things that cannot be repeated. But it was such a fun day and I just really remember being behind that curtain, sweating and falling in love all at the same time.

OW: Taking it back to the beginning, you started writing at 12 years old. What was the driving force that made you decide to start making music and did your creative endeavours begin pre-music getting involved?

 

MP: I was writing poetry and short stories when I was really young. I remember The Guardian used to have short story competitions and I always thought I was going to enter and then I absolutely never did because I could never get to the end of the short story. But, if the readers don’t know, you and I have been best friends since we were like 10. We lived on neighboring roads.

 

OW: I think I got told that I had to walk to school with these girls down the road so I think we met early one morning.

 

MP: And this feels like it has to be said, but you made music, you played guitar and you sang. I remember you did the talent show in year seven and I printed out a sign in support. You sang Lego House maybe? I thought you were really cool and you said you would teach me guitar so I borrowed your guitar and you taught me the first chords I learned and I started singing a little bit too.

 

And then, as legend has it, I took that guitar to school because I was doing guitar lessons and I broke it a little bit in the music rooms and I remember saying “I promise, one day I will buy you a better guitar,” and that day has not happened yet!

 

I started playing in year seven so I was 12 or 13 and then from then, playing really bad guitar, I very quickly fell in love with writing songs and was writing songs every day on my laptop. I would get home from school, sit at my desk with my laptop and write three songs a night. I would always try and make my sister write songs with me but she never wanted to.

 

OW: I remember vividly you would write them on word documents and you had a bank of about a hundred.

 

MP: They are on that laptop somewhere. I don’t know where that laptop is but I need to find it. Do you remember one of the first songs that I wrote and put on the internet was this song called Underdressed, and it went kind of Facebook viral? It was in black and white, it was me in my room and it was a song I’d written about a girl that made me insecure and I think my crush liked her. Honestly, I could not tell you who it was about anymore. Lots of people claimed at the time.

 

“I started playing in year seven so I was 12 or 13 and then from then, playing really bad guitar, I very quickly fell in love with writing songs and was writing songs every day on my laptop. I would get home from school, sit at my desk with my laptop and write three songs a night.”

 

OW: I remember it so much and I know what my theory was.

 

MP: I put that on Facebook and it went kind of viral and I remember just thinking it was so insane, being in science and refreshing as comments would be coming in, it was so exciting. I think from then on I was posting covers and original songs. I then had a YouTube channel and from there it sort of just took off.

 

OW: Where were you pulling these references and themes in your songs of heartbreak and really complex emotional feelings? Was 12-year-old Maisie experiencing deep, great heartbreak? Where was that fuelled by?

 

MP: So, I definitely was not experiencing deep guttural heartbreak at age 12. I was reading a lot and I was always just really inspired by words. Other people’s words, other people’s songs and so I was reading a lot when I was a kid. I was really inspired by characters and books and Taylor Swift and the world that she would create. I was also really inspired by Grey’s Anatomy. I was very constantly writing outside of my own experience which I think was really good training for being a songwriter because it meant that then when I did start living sort of my own life and having my own experiences, I was really equipped to write them. I’d sort of cut my teeth writing all these other stories, and it made my songwriting capabilities stronger. I think my storytelling was stronger because I did so many years of really having nothing to work with but my imagination. Lots of my favourite artists like Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon, lots of the most incredible songwriters have spent years and albums writing outside of themselves and writing stories about other people. It’s very common. I think it’s more common nowadays to write autobiographically, which I do a lot of right now, but also historically it’s been very common to write in character. That’s something I’m excited to do more of again one day.

 

OW: People often say that heartbreak is great fuel for songwriting but love clearly inspires Florescence. You’ve talked a lot about this healing and confidence that you’ve gained through falling in love, but which emotional state do you find best inspires you?

 

MP: Interesting. I feel like love songs are definitely harder to write. I wonder if they’re less dramatic. They’re much more intimate and love is much broader, so it’s harder for me to write about in this very concise way. I really like to write music that feels reflective and definitely Florescence feels a lot like that.

 

It’s a lot of looking backwards. It’s much less present tense and much more looking back and analysing it from a different place so that was obviously something that I found myself writing a lot and really enjoyed writing. It’s nice, it gives you space to reinterpret your life and also find a conclusion from things, which is actually sort of fun and interesting, being able to look back at the experiences you’ve had and, if you’re writing retrospectively from a year, two years, three years later, actually “I can see now that what I thought was this was actually something else,” and it’s an interesting, almost sort of self-study you can do. So I really like writing retrospectively and you can hear that on Florescence. Sometimes that’s a love song but more often it’s a song about the loves that didn’t work out, but I think that’s what’s nice about this album. The very last song on the album is almost a love song to all the loves that brought you to where you are now. Most of those were not necessarily happy endings, but they were all endings that you needed to become who you are so I also like that that feels like a real theme of fluorescence.