Meet Maisie Peters, the rising star signed by Ed Sheeran

In timing that you might politely describe as ‘not ideal’, Maisie Peters is preparing to move house the same week as her album, You Signed Up For This, is due out.

Speaking from her box-strewn bedroom in east London ahead of the big move, the Ed Sheeran-endorsed singer-songwriter laughs when I - somewhat unhelpfully - point out that relocating is meant to be one of life’s most stressful events. “Turns out, so is releasing a debut album,” the 21-year-old retorts, rolling her eyes self-deprecatingly. “Who knew?”

If anyone can retain laser focus in the face of impending chaos it’s Peters. A scrupulously self-aware interviewee adept at articulating her thoughts at a million miles an hour, she also boasts the big advantage that she’s been preparing for this moment for the best part of a decade.

Growing up in a small town on the edge of Sussex’s South Downs, Peters started writing songs at the age of 12, and was busking original material by her mid-teens. “I had a lucrative business,” she grins, recalling her hours playing guitar next to Brighton’s Pavilion Gardens. “Though I think I made a lot of the money because I looked so young. I was 15 but I looked about 12, and I think people were like, ‘Oh, who is this sweet child singing pretty songs?’”

Peters started her own YouTube channel shortly after, and within two years had built a loyal following for her folky, self-penned songs. Tackling the romantic trials of teenage life in a manner that felt relatable and refreshingly honest, tracks like Electric and Someone To Love helped establish Peters as a storyteller with a keen eye for detail and a biting wit, in a similar vein to her great songwriting heroes Taylor Swift and Lily Allen.

While most emerging artists delete their early videos once signed, Peters chose to keep these formative moments online. “I think it’s important to see that success or growth doesn’t happen overnight.” she explains. “I want to show my journey, especially if that will inspire other young women to make music.”

Certainly, Peters’ journey so far has been pretty inspirational. There have been duets with JP Saxe and James Bay, a TV performance on James Corden’s show, big syncs on Love Island for her singles Favourite Ex and Feels Like This, and she recently wrote the soundtrack for the second series of Apple TV drama Trying. Perhaps most excitingly, she recently received a co-sign on Twitter from Taylor Swift for her rendition of Swift’s single Betty. Now, following an EP and several singles with Atlantic Records, Peters has become the first female signing on Ed Sheeran’s Gingerbread Records imprint, and opened for him at HMV’s 100th birthday show at Coventry Empire.

In 2022, she will follow her mentor’s accros Europe during his ‘+ - = ÷ x Tour’ (pronounced ‘The Mathematics Tour’). “It’s a dream to get to support Ed on this tour,” she said. “Playing venues like these with an artist like him is something beyond the realm of anything I ever thought possible.”

Being a lifelong Sheeran fan, Peters is still suitably blown away by the whole thing. “The music that Ed makes was so formative to the music that I make, and the music everyone makes as a singer-songwriter,” she explains. “So when he mentioned that he saw a lot of himself in me, it was obviously a big compliment.”

Peters’ praises Sheeran for making wearing many different hats seem easy, whether that’s being a boss, a mentor or a friend. Arguably, his most valuable contribution is his input as a co-writer with a hand in three tracks on You Signed Up For This: Boy with Joe Rubel (Dodie, Tom Grennan), Hollow alongside Rubel and Johnny McDaid (Pink, Shawn Mendes), and current single Psycho with Shape Of You-songwriter Steve Mac.

A buoyant, synth-driven slating of an emotionally manipulative ex, it’s a total earworm, and unquestionably Peters’ most commercially-minded creation yet. And yet, as Peters tells it, a big pop moment was always on the cards.

“I grew up on ABBA, Taylor, Kelly Clarkson, Carly Rae Jepsen and all of those people, so for an album to be reflective of me it would have to have a song like that. [Pop music] is just so much a part of my personality. And Psycho is so much fun. I can just imagine teenage girls screaming it at karaoke at 2am.”

Like fellow-Swifty Olivia Rodrigo, Peters’ specialises in bittersweet, bordering-on-emo, coming of age storytelling, packed with the kind of infinitely quotable soundbites that scream out to be scrawled on school books. “You should take this personally”, she snipes on Boy, later chiding, “If I was the last girl on earth you’d still be weighing up your options.” The title-track begins with the enjoyably self-aware line “I am 20 and probably upset right now,” while the knowingly melodramatic Volcano finds Peters resolving to throw her ex into the lava, with the kiss-off, “I hope death is sudden.” Couple the latter with the blood-splattered, Carrie-esque video for former single John Hughes Movie, and you have to wonder if the deceptively innocent-appearing Peters is actually the type to hold a grudge.

“I mean, I’m the first person to savage something. My mother calls me spiky, which I think is not entirely inaccurate,” she grins. “And [Volcano] is super angry and super hurt - and kind of petty, as somebody told me last night, and I was like, it’s not a lie. But also the whole premise of that song is the fact that you’re actually going to say nothing about it... It’s this idea of actually feeling all of those things and not being able to convey them to somebody.”

When I counter that it might seem strange that a lyricist as articulate as Peters might struggle to express herself in real life, she laughs. “That’s why! I just use it all up in my songs! I just have literally none left.”

That Peters pours everything into her songwriting is indicative of the fierce drive she believes she inherited from her mother. “She taught me to go after the things you want and not settle. And my sister is the same. I’m from a family of scarily ambitious women: pity my father.”

After just 40 minutes in her company it’s difficult to imagine anything derailing that vision. Least of all a room full of boxes.

You Signed Up For This is released on August 27