Maisie Peters

Maisie Peters Artistfacts

  • May 28, 2000
  • Maisie Peters grew up in Steyning, a small town in West Sussex, with her father Nick, a geography teacher, and her mother Diane, a communications professional. Neither parent is a musician, but both are self-confessed music obsessives. "My Dad got kicked out of recorder club as a child, very tone deaf vibes!" Peters told F Word magazine. "But they both loved music, my Dad would go to gigs all the time."
  • Peters has a twin sister, Ellen, who has appeared on her YouTube channel. The bond between the sisters has fed directly into Peters' music - her 2021 single "Brooklyn" was written about Ellen. Peters has spoken about the strange experience of going into the music industry while her twin followed a more conventional path, the kind of diverging roads that became a recurring theme in her songwriting.
  • Peters was only 12 years old when she wrote her first "album" - a fully conceived collection of songs told entirely from the perspective of a scorned Texas woman who had just thrown her husband in a river. She was living with her twin sister and her parents in Steyning at the time, with no apparent Texas connections whatsoever. It was an early sign that Peters' imagination as a writer had absolutely no intention of staying inside the lines.
  • At 15, Peters took to busking on the streets of Brighton. "I'd set up and sing Disney covers and Britney Spears deep cuts for hours to try and earn some pocket money," she recalled to BeatRoute.

    Peters also began uploading original songs to YouTube around the same time, quietly building a fanbase that would eventually stretch across the world before she had a record deal.
  • In June 2021, Peters became the first artist signed to Ed Sheeran's Gingerbread Man Records label. Sheeran announced the signing himself, saying: "She's a very special artist who continues to push her storytelling in new directions. We had a few great writing sessions together and from there I knew I had to work with her."

    Peters later co-wrote "Psycho" with Sheeran and producer Steve Mac, released as her first single under the label.
  • In August 2024, Peters opened for Taylor Swift on the penultimate night of the Eras Tour at Wembley Stadium. Long before she was opening for her, Peters was a devoted Taylor Swift fan, and it was because of Swift that she first decided she had to make music.

    "I saw Taylor Swift, specifically the 'Love Story' music video with her in a white wedding dress in a Romeo and Juliet castle," Peters told Beyond The Stage, "and from there borrowed a friend's guitar and started writing songs."
  • Peters has cited ABBA as one of her most formative early influences alongside Taylor Swift, Lily Allen, Sara Bareilles, and - perhaps unexpectedly - My Chemical Romance. She traces the emotional DNA of her own writing to that mix, describing the music she loves to The Line of Best Fit as "sort of sad, but joyful," which is more or less a working definition of ABBA's greatest hits.
  • Peters' second album, The Good Witch (2023), debuted at #1 on the UK Albums Chart, making her the youngest female UK artist to top the chart in almost 10 years. The album was Peters' own description of a "twisted version of a breakup album" and established her as one of the most compelling voices in British pop. Her follow-up, Florescence (2026), also hit #1 in the UK.

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