Maisie Peters on ‘You Signed up for This,’ Working With Ed Sheeran

It was a Monday night in New York City and Maisie Peters was spilling her guts to approximately 1,500 close friends.

“In this next song, I sing, ‘Sushi and a fake ID.’ And the friend whose fake ID that was, Natasha, is here tonight,” she announced to the crowd at Webster Hall, giving a theatrical wave.

“In this song, I also sing, ‘He’s fit, go for it,'” Peters continued. “Said boy, who was fit, who I did go for, is also here tonight. Everyone say hi Joe!”

It’s no small feat to make a sold-out concert feel like a cozy sleepover. Peters’ candor may feel spontaneous, even ill-advised at times — in “Villain,” she confesses to being “drunk and mean” outside her ex’s house, and in “Psycho,” she compares another former flame to a serial killer — but in reality, Peters has mastered the art of selective intimacy, giving her the ability to morph into whoever the listener needs her to be.

In “Brooklyn,” the song she was gearing up to perform, she wields this power with ease, transforming from a British indie-pop superstar into your best friend who can’t wait to tell you about her holiday in the city.

The song tells the true story of a trip she took with her twin sister when they were 19. Each detail is hand-picked and sharpened into pop perfection: a lone jacket on a cold plane at 3 a.m.; a drunken rendezvous in Harlem; an attractive American boy who caught her eye at a bar.

At a popular brunch spot in the East Village the next day, Peters, now 21, didn’t even hesitate when I asked her to dish about Joe.

With her aforementioned friend Natasha, Peters had gone to a frat party at Columbia University, where they played the drinking game Rage Cage and Peters embarked upon a “little holiday romance.”

“It’s actually a very sweet story and not dramatic at all,” she admitted, sipping her chai latte. The exes still keep in touch, though she hadn’t seen Joe since 2019 and didn’t tell him he’d receive an onstage shout-out.

“I’m very much the same person in my music,” she explained. “But there is definitely a sort of performer’s switch you flip. Then you’re like, ‘I can’t believe I did that. I would never do that.'”

To my surprise, Peters described herself as “relatively passive” in her day-to-day life. Her lyrics would suggest otherwise.

“I get that a lot,” she nodded. “I put a lot of stuff in my songs that maybe I wouldn’t ever say to people and I don’t ever say to people. Hilarious.”

Peters recently adopted a more classic pop-star look, swapping her natural brown hair for a halo of blond — a process she affectionately referred to as “Bleachella,” in reference to Taylor Swift’s famous platinum bob at Coachella in 2016.

“It’s my first sort of big hair change and it was relatively spontaneous,” she said. “I feel more chaotic, more prone to risky decisions. I make a risky decision and I’m like, ‘Well I’m blond now, so it feels right.'”

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Peters grew up as a self-described “restrained” brunette in Steyning, a small town near the sea in Sussex, England. From an early age, she had a voracious appetite for music that was decidedly not genetic; she described her father as “tone-deaf” and her mother and sister as “not far off.”

She began writing songs at the age of 12, modeling her “troubadour” style after the likes of Swift, Sara Bareilles, and Lily Allen, as well as folk legends like Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell.

In those early years, most of her work was fictional, sung from the perspectives of imaginary admirers or TV characters. She distinctly remembers writing a song about the fraught love affair of Meredith and Derek from “Grey’s Anatomy.”

“When you start songwriting that young, you have nothing else to talk about. There’s only so much you can talk about the guy from science,” Peters said. “You have to expand. I was really just pretending to be anyone.”

Even now that she’s known as a deeply confessional lyricist, Peters does not subscribe to the idea that resonant songwriting has to be factually accurate. She wouldn’t sacrifice the best rhyme in “Love Him I Don’t,” for example — “Met you through my favorite cousin / Lighting cigarettes off an oven / Fell for you and got a bad concussion” — just because the person who introduced her to an old lover wasn’t a blood relative.

“Sometimes people hold themselves almost too accountable. It’s like, ‘This has to be 100% honest,’ and that’s so not true,” she explained. “Or what’s more accurate is, everything’s true. Everything’s rooted in truth and honesty. I find when I write, everything is something I’ve felt or I’ve seen someone close to me feel.”

“Without sounding like a dick, it’s art,” she added, shrugging. “It’s telling stories and painting a picture.”

 

Callie Ahlgrim

Peters’ prodigious knack for storytelling and sonic portraiture drew the attention of Ed Sheeran, who signed Peters to his label Gingerbread Man Records last year.

Sheeran also cowrote multiple songs on her debut album, 2021’s “You Signed Up for This,” including the fan-favorite single “Psycho.” During their very first studio session together, they created its two siblings: the arresting acoustic ballad “Hollow” and the cheeky kiss-off “Boy.”

Peters described her instant connection with Sheeran as “wholesome” and “sort of familial.”

“It sounds funny to say, because he’s the biggest star in the world, but we just had a lot of mutual friends,” she explained, listing producers Joe Rubel and Fred Gibson (known professionally as Fred again..) as examples.

“We’re very similar in the way we work,” she continued. “I would like to think in our personalities as well. I feel like I model a lot of myself on him and how he operates just because it’s really inspiring, and I think he’s simultaneously the most talented and really the sweetest, the most polite, the most courteous to everyone.”

With three diamond-certified songs and a still-pristine reputation, Sheeran is perhaps the ideal person to seek guidance from when navigating the mercurial music industry. Indeed, Peters said Sheeran offered her two pieces of advice “that always stick out to me, equally as important as each other.”

“One is, ‘If you don’t want to get wasted, stay clear of spirits with little hats on top,'” she recounted.

The second, she added, is a bit more serious.

“It’s just that, doing what we do, there are some really high highs, but you’ll also go through periods of lows and you’ll go through periods of doubt or things aren’t working the way you want to,” Peters said. “Ed has always said, and I so agree, that it’s really important to not base your self-worth in either period.”

 

Callie Ahlgrim

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Coming down from the high of a sold-out concert, with hundreds or thousands of people screaming the stories of your own life, can be a challenge for any artist.

“I have a lyric that I haven’t used yet. So maybe I will, who knows? But I remember writing down something like, ‘There’s nothing like an empty hotel room in a country you don’t know to make you want to call someone you don’t speak to anymore,'” Peters said.

“I’m not necessarily an extrovert, but there’s something about that whiplash,” she added, popping a small potato into her mouth as she cast her gaze upward. “It’s the perfect word.”

Although her first headlining tour in North America will conclude on April 1 in Los Angeles, Peters has no plans to slow down. She’ll join Sheeran for his stadium tour this summer, which kicks off in Dublin on April 23.

Most impressively, Peters already has several songs for her next album. (Ideally, one would feature Jack Harlow, whom Peters named as her celebrity crush: “I’ve actually met him once and there’s no one smoother.”)

After finishing work on “You Signed Up for This,” which arrived last August, Peters had a “mad” schedule of promotional activities, from signings and interviews to festival sets and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

When she returned to London, she found the “deathly quiet” so unnerving that she simply threw herself back into the studio. As it turns out, whiplash can be inspiring.

“There was no time to really think or fret,” Peters said. “I was really worried after I made the first album.”

“I loved the album so much, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can make anything that I love as much as that,'” she continued. “There’s something about a first album that’s really special. But I love this new stuff I’ve made and I’m so excited about it.”

“It’s the most ‘me’ that I’ve been in all of my music,” Peters added, sweeping her bleached bangs away from her face. Sometimes, it seems, we have to change what appears natural to find what feels right.

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