Maisie Peters

“I grew up loving music but I wasn’t especially, precociously talented at anything,” Maisie Peters told Apple Music in 2021. “I really firmly believe that I taught myself because I just love it so much.” That process began in her early teens, when the Sussex singer-songwriter (born in 2000) borrowed a friend’s guitar and started experimenting, writing imaginative songs that transported her out of the small town she was raised in. But it’s hard to believe Peters wasn’t always just naturally gifted. Lauded by Ed Sheeran (who in 2021 told Apple Music she was “the voice of this generation” and signed her to his Gingerbread Man record company) and by her ultimate inspiration Taylor Swift, the singer’s pop is assured but intimate, her lyrics pin-sharp and ultra-relatable. “I’ve always been really obsessed with lyrics,” said Peters. “I used to read lyric booklets and I love storytelling. It’s so in me—so to the core of what I do—that the lyric has to be something you would underline and say to a friend, ‘Did you hear that? Did you hear what she said? That’s so good.’ I would really struggle to do anything else.” In 2021, Peters delivered two projects. The first was her soundtrack to Season 2 of the Apple TV+ comedy Trying, a collection of nine original songs which found her in her “happy place” of soft and sweet folk pop. The second was her long-awaited debut, the wryly titled You Signed Up for This. “People had been asking for an album for literally four years, so it's only fair that I just give them two,” Peters said at the time. You Signed Up for This—housing that folk pop alongside tracks inspired by ’80s and early-2000s pop, as well as three songs co-written with Sheeran—took her decidedly out of her comfort zone (see “Psycho,” a song so removed from the singer’s early sound that she once told her manager it would “come out over my cold, dead corpse”). But across it all remains those gut-punching lyrics, as Peters dissects early adulthood—from growing up to falling in and out of love and using a fake ID. “This album feels like a triumph to me, of everything I’ve learned and everything I’ve done and all the work I've put in—all the years of writing and recording,” said Peters. “It feels like an album of someone who knows the beginnings, at least, of what the music is they want to make and how they want to sound.”