After an address mixup sends me sprinting a few blocks through Griffintown, I make it to the hotel where I’m speaking with Maisie Peters ahead of her show in Montreal and the release of her third album, Florescence. I am sweating in earnest. She’s wearing a dove blue mohair sweater and her signature tousled blonde bob. Her luggage lies zipped on the floor as if she hadn’t had time to unpack. There is less than an hour before check out.
I ask if she’s camera ready. “Give me five minutes,” she says, before disappearing into the bathroom. I’m still fiddling with the tripod stand when she emerges rosy-cheeked.
She sits down before the camera and flashes a bright smile, then admits, “I am feeling a little bit tired.”
The Before the Bloom tour has taken the 26-year-old pop star through Australia, then Europe and the UK; she has just arrived the night before from Washington DC. When she’s not playing shows, her schedule is peppered with media appearances and meetings.
Jet lag doesn’t dampen her excitement. “I feel a real love and a real fondness from the fans.” Later that night, she asks a packed Beanfield Theatre who among them had attended her 2023 The Good Witch tour. The crowd erupts.
Peters earned her stripes performing in more humble surroundings. Her career started out on Youtube, where she posted covers and original songs. “My first show in Montreal was in 2019. It was a very small venue and it was half full. There was a girl who couldn’t get in because of her age or something, so we ended up playing a little show for her outside the venue.”
These days, Peters is playing to thousands, and doing things her way. Her set is made up of acoustic-heavy arrangements, the majority of which are tracks from earlier albums that led her to Florescence. She also hosted a series of acoustic sessions in indie bookshops around the UK last year.
“It’s so nice to get to champion these places that I love going to. When I was coming up and playing at little pubs – it harks back to that time, it feels sweet and reminds me of how I started.”
“We’re trying to get Jack, our drummer, to read a book, but it’s not happened yet.”
Peters built her audience as a woman scorned and a chronicler of modern heartbreak. Listeners connected with her quick-witted humour and lyrical admissions of growing pains and post-breakup fury. Past music videos have featured her stalking an ex with an army of lookalikes, smothering her face in tiered cake, and ripping a boy’s heart out from his prom-suited chest.
Florescence stands out as a more forgiving, retrospective work, as stepping away from touring reshaped her sound. “I think that period of peace and reflection and just simplicity – I had a much simpler, smaller life with my loved ones – was really influential.”
On the single “Say My Name in Your Sleep,” the guitar work dances light and silvery, her vocals, ghostly, as she addresses a past lover with melancholic grace. Alongside “Audrey Hepburn,” an intimate epistle about finding love and coming home, these two singles helped shape the rest of the record.
“Things were slowing down and I was seeing the beginnings of a sustainable version of myself,” she reflects.
Although collaboration is an important part of her process, Florescence is the first time Peters has included artist features – Julia Michaels on “Kingmaker,” and Marcus Mumford on “If You Let Me” – whom she refers to as “real life heroes.”
She adds that a future dream collaboration would be with Montreal artist Leif Vollebekk. “I think he might come to the show tonight, which is very exciting for me. He’s got so much music that I love.”
Peters started her Youtube channel posting her own songs at 15, and two years later signed to Atlantic Records – a major boon for an upcoming artist, and one almost unheard of these days. That was followed by major tour support for artists like Coldplay and Noah Kahan and two album cycles. But offstage, she says, she has always desired a life that feels recognizably ordinary.
At the start of the decade – whilst she released and toured her first album, You Signed Up For This – she lived in “essentially in a university house.”
“I was going on these Ed Sheeran stadium tours and then I was coming back and talking about everyone’s dissertations with them. It was such a crazy whiplash.”
This, Peters tells me, is exactly what she wanted: normal coming-of-age experiences, like living with girls her age, hosting house parties, and debriefing about Hinge dates. She rattles off her favourite East London haunts, like Pophams Bakery and the Spurstowe Arms.
At the same time, Peters comes across as sharp and distinctly professional. She speaks in rapid bursts and self-assured, with the polish of someone accustomed to interviews. Only occasionally does she pause to choose her wording, or – it’s allergy season, after all – to sneeze.
Although she grew up in the public eye, Peters’ youth shielded her from the pressures of fame. A combination of juvenile invincibility and naivete kept self-doubt at bay. “It’s a sort of armour. You don’t know enough to be insecure or to be anxious or afraid.”
It also shaped how she thinks about social media and identity. Growing up online, she says, helped her to separate her public persona from her privat self. And with so much footage of her already out there, she no longer worries about the way she looks in photos. “Just post whatever,” she says with a flick of the wrist.
“I love sharing my life and sharing my music […] But I’m also a separate person outside of that and the internet can’t know that person. And in some ways, I can’t know the internet person. They’re two separate versions of myself.”
Despite the major milestones behind her, Peters is still chasing firsts. She lights up when talking about wanting to play a proper summer festival season, “when hundreds of thousands of people gather to just spend this one weekend with music and no sense of real life.” It’s a humble statement from someone who played Glastonbury in 2023 while Dave Grohl watched her set from the wings.
What else, then? There is a pause, and then she beams. “I would love to do a Tiny Desk. They are iconic, legendary, and I feel like maybe Florescence is my time.”
She turns to face the lens. “Please let Maisie Peters do a Tiny Desk. She’s begging.”
Watch the full interview below:
Florescence was released on May 22.
Interview by Irene Wang.
Photo – Ella Pavlides
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