Always the opener, never the headliner

Review of Maisie Peters' "The Good Witch (Deluxe)"

Maisie Peters—The Good Witch (Deluxe)

Released October 27, 2023

On Wednesday, October 23 it was announced that British singer-songwriter Maisie Peters would be opening for Kelsea Ballerini on her 40 date US tour in early 2025. While a no-brainer ticket, as both are artists are similar in terms of their personal, confessional songwriting styles, some of Peters’ fans lamented that she seems to jump from opening gig to opening gig when she certainly would have the draw to do a headlining tour of her own. Before she hits the road with Ballerini, Peters has also recently performed as the opening act on tours with Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, and Taylor Swift in the last year and she’s currently touring with Conan Grey.

With her latest album and fans gathered from her opening gigs, Peters has grown her audience to 2 million monthly listeners. So why isn’t she going out on the road on her own? And no, that’s not a rhetorical hook that I’m using to then tell you why I think she’s not a bigger star. I’m genuinely asking because I don’t get it either.

The Good Witch was released on June 23, 2023 and the deluxe edition, featuring 6 extra songs, was released in October of that year. My favorite tracks on this album are “The Good Witch,” “Body Better,” “The Band and I,” “Lost the Breakup,” “Run,” “Two Weeks Ago,” “BSC,” “Therapy,” “There It Goes,” “History of Man,” “Yoko,” “Truth Is,” and “The Last One.”

I didn’t love the entirety of this album, at 21 songs it’d be a major feat if I did, but the ones I do love I really love.

The title track has everything—vocals, lyrics, production. The whole album is rooted in Peters’ real life, her “searching for balance between career highs and personal lows,” making the stories she tells all that more grounded. I’m usually iffy on the use of voice notes, but I enjoy them here. Also the music beneath the voice notes sounds like it’d sound amazing live.

“Coming of Age” has a club pulse beat pre-brat with Taylor Swift-esque lyrics. This track also has a Mimi Webb-esque quality that’d be perfect for festivals.

“Body Better” is such a raw and honest song for this generation of young women and girls who grew up with social media and the internet. I truly believe Peters took the words out of our collective brains and gave it back to use in the form of this song, which truly cements her as a successor to Swift.

“The Band and I” is such a refreshing love song about friendship. As I get older, I’m realizing how important friendship love is in our lives, but it’s rarely focused on in songs and movies and books. It’s a different kind of intimacy and in the midst of Peters’ romantic lows while on the road, she really needed the love of her friends and her band to get her through and this is such a lovely tribute to that love.

Quite a few of the songs had been released as singles ahead of the album and I had heard them on TikTok, including “You’re Just a Boy (And I’m Kinda the Man).” Peters will be known as a quintessential TikTok artist, much like Noah Kahan. That’s not meant to be derogatory towards either artist, although being called a “TikTok artist” is often thrown around meaning to be insulting. But in the same way that Kahan reached newer heights and found a much wider audience that he had been working a long time to find, Peters’ Swift-inspired songwriting fed perfectly into the public hunger for all things Swift following the release of 2020’s folklore.

And similarly to Swift, Peters’ specialty is breakup songs, but with a modern twist. Where Swift focused more on the wrongdoings of the boys who broke her heart, Peters turns the breakup anthems from songs you listen to and cry to songs that you play before going on a night out or in the morning as you get ready for the day. Perhaps the best example of this is “Lost the Breakup.” The song is, in essence, “Your loss” which can feel like a night and days difference from songs that ask “Why wasn’t I good enough?” or “Will I ever find someone else?” Peters shows in this song that she knows she’s amazing and she’s not going to let this boy’s rejection of her change how she feels about herself. As younger generations report feeling worse about themselves thanks to the influence of both influencers and peers on social media, I think this is a really important shift in perspective for the future generations of women young and old.

In a full circle kinda moment, Peters performed this song live on stage at the Eras Tour in London and a clip went viral on TikTok, but not for the reason you think. During the bridge, where Peters imagines a conversation between herself and the ex in question, she puts on a voice imitating the ex.

@maisiehpetersi’m kinda busy like … i’m with taylor tonight!!! #tstheerastour

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The comments on that video were…less than kind. One said “Sounds like me on karaoke night,” while another asked “Is this a prank” Some comments defending Peters said it was just that particular video that made her sound bad and in other videos of that same moment in the song sounded fine. But many were seeing just that moment and taking it out of context. They saw Peters putting on a nasally voice to imitate an ex and people thought that was her actual singing voice. I knew the song already so I knew she was doing a voice on the bridge, but to be so honest, even if I didn’t know that it was part of the song and she does it during every performance, I didn’t think it sounded that different from her normal singing voice, at least not enough to warrant the kind of negative reaction it got. Plus I like that she changes the bit where she declines hanging out with the ex, saying “I’m kinda busy, but/Like, stay in touch?” to a moment where she can shout out wherever she is, so for the Eras tour she sang “I’m kinda busy/Like I’m at Taylor tonight” and when I saw her live in Glasgow she said “I’m at TRNSMT tonight.” I think it’s a fun detail that makes the performance unique to that crowd. TikTok haters be damned.

It’s hard to not see “Wendy” as a more obvious reference to Swift, who has before referenced Peter Pan and Wendy Darling in songs “cardigan” and “Peter.” In this version, Peters is thinking about Wendy, whose story she thought “felt compelling and untold,” and the paths that one could take, either to follow another or to follow their own. She wrote of this song, “It’s about knowing when not to make sacrifices, even though you want to, about drawing a line and shutting the window and putting your own future first, instead of trying to help someone else find theirs.” Peters’ version was released before Swift’s “Peter” from The Tortured Poets Department which follows a similar theme, with Swift placing herself in the Wendy role and telling her version of Peter Pan that she’s no longer waiting for him. Being able to now look at these two songs side by side, with their similar concepts and themes, we see Swift is lamenting that Peter never came back from her, and she’s having to finally accept that he was never going to come for her, and there’s a bit of anger that she always kept this torch for him, while Peters feels more like she’s defiant, she’s asking “What about me? Don’t I get a chance to fly too?” It’s just very interesting to see how two different artists, alike as they are, approach the same concept.

I became a fan of “Run” after seeing her play it live at TRNSMT. I didn’t know many of her songs, but I still went to see her set. The album had just come out a few weeks before and I wasn’t at all familiar with her first album, but this song caught my ear as soon as she started playing it. Now, a year and half later, this song is still my favorite off the album.

The run from tracks 10 to 15 really encapsulates the whole album. Starting with my favorite track, “Run,” followed by “Two Weeks Ago,” which features some of Peters’ best songwriting, and the humor of “BSC” which I’m honestly surprised no one had written a song like this before. The infectious melody and catchiness of “Therapy” serves as precursor to “There It Goes,” another favorite about healing which finds its way into all my fall playlists. On a personal note, this song is really meaningful to me because the first September following the album’s release I had just come home from the UK and my year abroad, which had some very high highs and some very low lows. When she sings “I’m doing better, I made it to September/I can finally breathe,” I really really felt that.

The original track listing of the album ends with “History of Man,” but the deluxe release includes six extra tracks, my favorites of which are “Yoko,” “The Song,” and “The Last One.”

I loved the theme of “Yoko,” and with the melody being one of the strongest on the whole album, I’m so surprised this didn’t end up on the main tracklist. I liked the melody on “The Song” and the beat on “Truth Is.” “Guy on a Horse” was too similar to “I’m Kinda the Man,” so I’m fine with it being a bonus track, but also would have been fine if it was left off the tracklist all together.  “The Last One” shares similar elements with the opening track, which creates a nice cyclical movement when played the whole way through.

On paper, Maisie Peters should be one of the big pop girlies alongside Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and Gracie Abrams. She has all the same elements that fans love right now—fun, dancey bops with real and vulnerable songwriting about relationships that read like a personal diary. What’s not to love?

She’s a really fun performer to see live. I didn’t know very many of her songs when I caught her set in Glasgow, but I really enjoyed her performance. And she’s been at this a long time. She first started by uploading singing videos to YouTube when she was 15, just like other YouTuber-turned-mainstream artists like Dodie, Troye Sivan who’s now touring with Charli XCX, and Conan Grey, Peters’ current touring partner. After a few EPs with Atlantic Records, a deal she signed when she was still a teenager, she later signed with Ed Sheeran’s imprint label under Warner Music Group called Gingerbread Man Records. On Sheeran’s label, Peters released her first record You Signed Up For This in 2021 before following it up with The Good Witch in 2023, which did go to Number 1 in the UK, making her the youngest solo British female artist in close to a decade to go number 1 on the UK charts.

And it’s not like she’s never gone on her own solo headlining tour, in the spring of 2023 she did a tour of “intimate” shows in small venues across the UK. But still the question remains, for all of her success, including selling the most physical copies of her record in indie UK record shops during release week, why aren’t we hearing all about her?

For one possible reason, there seems to be a catch-22 in being an acolyte of Taylor Swift. It’s no secret that Peters finds inspiration in Swift’s songwriting, once tweeting “taylor [Swift] is the reason i make music.” On one hand, Swift changed the game for female singer-songwriters so the idea that there would be future artists following in her path was always inevitable, and for one of those artists to be compared to her and asked to open for her would be an honor, but on the other hand, we already have one Taylor Swift and she’s irreplaceable. For many Swifties, she is all that they listen to, even when there are so many artists who have taken inspiration from her and make music very similar to hers. So that association with Swift can actually have an averse effect on an artist like Peters’ career because for some she’s too Swift-like and they want something different, but for others, because she isn’t Taylor Swift herself, she’s not Swift enough and they’re uninterested. But I think they’re really missing out, because for my money, Peters is one of the best artists to come from this next generation of Swift inspired musicians.

Another reason I think Peters hasn’t gotten the mainstream attention I think she deserves is because she’s very popular on TikTok. Like being compared to or called an acolyte of Taylor Swift, being considered a “TikTok musician” can carry a element of contempt with it. But that’s not at all my intention. My intent is to say that TikTok has become a tool for artists to find audiences when it was previously much more challenging to do so and Peters has been one of the most successful in finding an audience on the platform. And it makes sense that she would, her songs are fun and playful while still having incredible songwriting and I’m glad that fans have been able to find her through the app.

Maybe the mainstream and general public just missed the boat on this one. It happens. It happened with Lorde’s Solar Power, which has gotten more love from fans since it’s been released, and as you may well know, I am a Kacey Musgraves’ star-crossed truther. So maybe this album just needs a bit more time for larger audiences to find out what they were missing. Peters has already teased that she’s working on her third studio album, so maybe that combined with her upcoming opening gig with Kelsea Ballerini, the right audiences will finally find out what the girlies on TikTok already know, which is that Maisie Peters is deserving of being a major pop girl and it’s only a matter of time until she is.