“It’s been the most mental year of my life.”
It was in October 2023 when a then-23-year-old Maisie Peters sat down with Rolling Stone UK, and, through disbelieving laughter, candidly spoke about her somewhat surprising skyrocket to stardom.
Peters – who wrote her first song at the age of nine and released Place We Were Made, her first single, in 2017 – had been working for more than a decade when opening for Ed Sheeran on his world tour finally brought her breakthrough.
It also, as she would grow to discover, came at a price.
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When Peters spoke with the magazine, she had just been given its coveted Breakthrough Award – and it was clear to see why.
Months earlier, on the same day she played Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, her second album, The Good Witch, came out and immediately shot to number one in the UK Official Charts.
Peters, who later went on to sell out Wembley Arena, became the youngest act who is a woman to achieve this charting feat in almost a decade.
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Despite her newfound notoriety, Peters had told Harpers Bazaar Australia days after she opened for Sheeran at Sydney’s Accor Stadium she still felt “normal”.
Peters was, after all, still living in a share house with two friends in London with two albums – and all the screaming fans they brought – under her belt.
“I feel like I’ve missed like a handbook where they tell you how to like do famous people things,” she told the publication in March 2023. “But I don’t really know, like how else to live.”
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Three years after first putting lyrics to barlines, a 12-year-old Peters started taking songwriting, and music, seriously.
By 14, she was busking Disney tracks on the streets of Brighton, and in 2018, she was signed to Atlantic Records after uploading songs on YouTube.
Sheeran signed her to his label, Gingerbread Man Records, in 2021, and from 2022 to 2023, she travelled across the globe to perform 60 shows with him.
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That included his record-breaking Melbourne show, which saw Sheeran perform for more than 105,000 people at the MCG.
”It’s amazing to get to play to a crowd that size,” she reflected in an interview with Marie Claire Australia. “[Sheeran]’s so generous and inspiring. It’s so cool to learn from somebody like that.”
“It’s a crazy thing to have done in your life. I did it when I was 22, 23, and it’s just the coolest,” she further reflected to Rolling Stone UK. “I’m so grateful that he took me around the world and believed in me.”
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Sheeran isn’t the only big name artist Peters has performed for, with the now-24-year-old notably opening for one of Taylor Swift’s five The Eras Tour shows in London in August 2024.
It was a dream come true for Peters, who had considered Swift, 35, her idol since her childhood.
“I picked up a guitar when I was 13, inspired by Taylor Swift’s Love Story and started writing songs, and the rest is sort of history,” she told local paper Brighton’s Finest in 2019, citing Swift as her inspiration and hero.
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“I love the music that she makes. I love her records; they’re all so important to me,” Peters also told Rolling Stone UK of Swift, less than a year before she was named as one of the titan’s opening acts.
“I’m really, really honoured to be compared to her, and to be thought of in the same frame of mind, in anyone’s mind, as her. She’s a big inspiration of mine.”
But it was performing in front of 90,000 of her hero’s legion of fans that forced Peters to confront an ugly reality.
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After Peters shared a video of her singing one of her biggest songs – Lost the Breakup – as part of her set (an experience she called “surreal”), her posts on Instagram and TikTok were flooded with comments criticising her vocals.
The ridicule went on for days before slowing, but the backlash left a lasting mark on Peters.
“It’s really difficult, and you get bitten twice as hard when you’re someone that is online,” Peters told Rolling Stone UK of being in the public eye months before she found herself at the centre of a storm.
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She had no idea what was coming when she told the magazine, “People forget I’m still a person that’s seeing this… I’ve found it really difficult.”
“When you’re touring and away from home, and you’re really tired and running on empty, and then you just see X, Y and Z on TikTok or on Twitter about yourself, it really takes it out of you.”
At least, she said with a wry smile, she could say the criticism is a sign she’s relevant.
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