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Maisie Peters has a blocked throat chakra. It sounds worse than it is. The throat chakra is the divine energy point of communication, assisting in the truthful expression of thoughts, feelings, and creativity. A bit of light dry brushing across her neck and vigilant journaling in a blue notebook — the color is important — should open it back up, a psychic explains over a fold-out table inside Aum Shanti, an East Village destination for crystals, incense, and spiritual trinkets.
A crystal ball sits at our periphery. Surrounded by spears of cleansing selenite, it's there to facilitate divination and bring clarity, to help open the mind's eye. It also looks cool. Over email, getting our tarot read seemed like an appropriate way to spend an early Thursday afternoon together. In a few months, Peters will release her anticipated sophomore album, The Good Witch, a manifestation of "power and destruction, benevolence, and femininity," she tells Teen Vogue. In actuality, tarot is more of an uncomfortable exercise in oversharing, especially between two people who just met: me, an emotionally unavailable believer (the reader's words, not mine), and her, a triple Gemini and self-described "classic British cynic" with a closed chakra. She sees the inherent humor in the situation.
"For someone who has called her album The Good Witch, I’m not a very spiritual person," the 23-year-old tells me over a late lunch in midtown, where we've traded the scent of palo santo for wafts of Santal 33 and top 40 hits. "It's not in my nature." She does, however, respect the practice and even flirts with it on occasion. She recently bought a tarot deck while on tour, and she and her bandmates like to give one another faux readings to pass the time. Right now she's carrying black tourmaline (to dispel negative energy) and citrine (to bring success, money, and creativity) in a small sachet in her coat pocket, a gift from the solicitous shop owner who followed us both on Instagram just half an hour prior. She's also seriously considering wearing more red underwear to feel grounded in her personal power, per the psychic's recommendation. “I felt like, 'You guys really believe this.' It's enticing when you see somebody believing in something so much. It makes you want to join.”
Her closest point of comparison is music. For Peters, it's more of a tangible form of magic, callused fingertips plucking guitar strings and conjuring chords like witchcraft.
It's the only thing she's ever truly believed in. "Music is the biggest thing in my life," she says. Her bleach-blonde fringe, practically white in the light, lays perfectly flat just above her big, blue Sonny Angel eyes. They light up when she tastes a spoonful of her Colombian soup. "It's hard for me to say grand sentences like this because I'm such a British person, and we shy away from being too sentimental." But even her taut Britishness is no match for the love of her life. "There's never been any person or feeling or relationship that has ever been bigger to me than my relationship with music."
She fell in love at an early age. Growing up in Steyning, a small town near the sea in West Sussex, England, where timber-framed buildings line quiet streets, Peters often escaped in the velvety pages of fictional stories. She'd bend the spines and mark the margins of her most sacred texts, The Twilight Saga and The Great Gatsby. Never a fan of being read to, she preferred to move at her own voracious pace. She started writing short stories and poetry in primary school, skills that naturally developed into songwriting as she began curating her taste. She'd pore over the lyric booklets of her favorite albums — Lily Allen's Alright, Still, Florence and the Machine's Lungs, ABBA Gold, and Taylor Swift's Fearless — enamored by their fanciful anecdotes and attention to detail. Despite having no formal music training, she'd make drum beats with her hands and fill her notebooks from cover to cover. When she was 12, she borrowed a friend's acoustic guitar and taught herself to play by watching YouTube videos.
"I was so obsessed," she recalls, "for no reason. It wasn't like I told my family, 'I want to be a singer. I want to be a writer. I want to be a pop star.' I had none of that. I just loved doing it… I wrote so much music and wanted it to go somewhere, but there was no big, grand plan."
Within a year, she had written hundreds of songs, the result of an overactive imagination; by 15, she had joined a band and started regularly busking on the street and performing at pubs, posting original songs on her YouTube page. Early cuts wallow in life's messiest bits, gentle melodies for tempestuous feelings, and a folksy lilt over wistful keys. "Waiting around, still halfway hopeful that you'll show," she sings on 2017's "Birthday," one of her first independently released singles. "You've said you'd call, of course you won't, I should've known."
"I'm someone who writes music to remember," she shares over a plate of truffle fries. "A lot of why I write music is to chronicle and document. I think some people write music for catharsis, and that's not really my experience with it." She supposes the healing comes after, not for her but rather for the listener to bear. These "stamps of memory," as she calls them, frozen in time signatures, no longer belong to just her. "When you write music the only person that's relevant is yourself," she says. "You're very much in that moment. Then when you release it, it's really not about me at all, or even the person I wrote about. You can listen back to it, you can hear how you felt, but you can't really feel it anymore."
It's a lesson in Swiftian storytelling. It's crafting an image so lyrical and engaging that it places the listener alongside you in the room where it happened — the heartbreak, the disappointment, the love. Last year, Swift described a good song as something that "stays with you even when people or feelings don’t." Peters cites the Midnights mastermind as her "holy grail," her most formative influence. You can hear it in the way she sets a scene. "I am 20 and probably upset right now," she sings on the opening track of her debut album, You Signed Up For This, released under Ed Sheeran's Gingerbread Man Records in 2021. It's an affirmation of self-awareness, equal parts sincere and melodramatic. On "John Hughes Movie," she laments unrequited love over synthy melodies and elastic beats; "Boy," co-written by Sheeran, is a smooth kiss-off to a serial cheater in which she deliciously delivers the lyric "I could be a grown-up, but baby you know what / maybe I’ll release this song instead" with all the pettiness of a young woman scorned.
The Good Witch inhabits a similar space — broken hearts, bruised egos, and offbeat anthems — but Peters displays a heightened sense of introspection and emotional range. If You Signed Up For This was directed at you, the listener, then The Good Witch gazes inward. A breakup album at its core, she sees herself as the story's arcane narrator, both its playwright and its muse.
It begins with a titular prologue that feels ripped from the foxed pages of an old storybook; it's "the calm before the storm comes rushing through," she sings. "Coming of Age" is a propulsive blast of main character energy that delivers disdain with a playful wink. ("Baby, I am The Iliad / Of course you couldn't read me," she sings over a thumping baseline.) There's the twangy Shania Twain-inspired "You’re Just a Boy (And I’m Kinda the Man)." The delicate ballad "Wendy" cautions against falling for a lost boy no matter how enticing it looks, while riotous "Run" delivers an age-old warning: "If a man says he wants you in his life forever, run." Like so much of Peters' work, the song took shape after a late-night conversation with friends. "I've been told that by multiple men, 'I want you in my life forever,' which is never good!" she says. "I don't know any of them anymore."
Unbeknownst to her at the time, she began working on the album during a songwriting session in Stockholm shortly after the release of You Signed Up For This. She wrote the 2022 pop-punk single "Cate's Brother" — a "Stacy's Mom" for the new era — alongside what would become the oldest song on The Good Witch, "Watch," a track fueled by '90s alt-rock and righteous anger of watching your ex move on without you. The rest of the album came together throughout the year as she worked through her feelings while opening for Sheeran on his stadium tour in the UK. She flew between Stockholm and the Evermore-esque countryside in Suffolk to record. The final song, "There It Goes," was written with her good friend Miranda Cooper in Bergen, Norway, a picturesque city off the Southern coast, in late November 2022. "It was the last thing I had to say…everything that was left in my heart," she says.
A spiritual sisterhood blossomed among Peters and her collaborators, creating a safe space for her to delve into her most intrusive insecurities. Lead single "Body Better" found her at her most vulnerable, sitting up in the dark, way past midnight, writing lyrics in her Notes app about the singular ache of watching someone you love love someone else. The ugliest thoughts poured out of her.
"As I get older, I'm more aware of what's going to age well. You go through a breakup, and you feel a wide range of things, and not all of them should be immortalized," she says. There's an entire first verse that Peters scrapped. "It was so petty." But those were the words she needed to expel from her mind at the time. "You should expose as much as you want of yourself and say whatever you want to say," she adds. "I would never filter anything, but it's about having a little bit of time to think, like, 'Do I want to sing this forever?'"
"Body Better" is part of what she calls the "trauma trio" with "Two Weeks Ago" and "Want You Back," her Track 5. Ask any Taylor Swift fan, and they'll tell you the significance of a Track 5. Was it a conscious choice on Peters' part? "I believe in Swiftie law," she smiles. "Even if I tried to tell myself I wasn't doing it, I just am. I'm too well-trained." On "Lost The Breakup," she pulls another page from Swift's songwriting book with a clever third-act twist. "As a songwriter, it’s about finding the emotional punchline," she says. There are also easter eggs for her fans to uncover throughout the album — interpolated melodies and references to her favorite novels (The Secret History and Song of Achilles, to name a few). Peters likes to joke that she's in a parasocial relationship with her fans, but she knows just how formative and life-altering fandom can be. For her, it's not so one-sided.
"I feel very lucky to have this group of people listen to my music and care the way that I do," she says. "I feel very responsible for making sure people connect to it."
After lunch, we walk over to the label's headquarters, where a group of young people are gathered outside of the building. They're here for a private listening session, the first of several Peters hopes to host for fans in the lead-up to the album's release. As they enter the cozy room in a haze of excitement she greets them like old friends, tender and warm; several of them have been following her career since her early YouTube days. They sit on pillowy cushions on the floor and pass around Milk Bar cookies, treats provided by Peters' team. One by one they introduce themselves. There are groups of friends, Brooklyn roommates who first met online in stan spaces, and parents who share their love of Peters' music with their teenagers.
"I wanted to introduce her to someone she could grow up with," a mom explains, sitting next to her auburn-haired daughter. To that, Peters clutches her heart. She, too, has marked the passage of time in the album cycles and eras of her favorite artists.
She plays a handful of tracks for the fans, and in between she tells stories about the making of the album, like how she fell so ill in Bergen she wrote five songs in a week-long daze. One of those songs, "BSC," unfurls her messy thoughts like a fever dream. "The concept [of the track] is you think I'm alright, that I'm doing good, and in fact, I'm literally crazy, like f*cking crazy," she laughs. It starts to feel like a casual hangout among friends. "I really love the Charlie Hickey album Nervous at Night," Peters says when asked what she was listening to while writing the album. Several attendees share shy smiles from across the room. It's now a secret among them no one else is allowed to know. At least not yet. Before they leave, Peters makes them swear to secrecy not to reveal any of the evening's intimate details.
A few fans linger after the listening party. One gives her a colorful Good Witch hat she crocheted herself. With zero hesitation, Peters places it atop her head in genuine awe. It's still in her hands as she exits the room.
The exchange reminds me of something she had said at lunch: "They prescribe a whole person to me… All based on my truth of who I am and who they think I am, and that's fine. I don't feel like I need to correct it or change it. I'm really happy with everyone hearing my music, and if they liked it, and they liked me, then they can have that."
Being a writer of the song is a unique experience. You craft something so personal, so intensely honest and unguarded, and then it becomes someone else's. Your words shape their emotions. "There's sadness, and there's magic in it," Peters explains. "And there's joy in it." As a writer, she's composing something real and spiritual, her own tool of divination; it calls to her now at 23 just as it did at 22 and at 15 — a song that can reach across the table and peer into your soul.
