Maisie Peters has quickly been taking over the pop scene with her vulnerable lyrics and ability to write a song so relatable it feels like she's writing specifically for you. Through deeply earnest songwriting, Peters serves as a brave voice to audiences trying to navigate the challenges of young love. Her latest song "Body Better" is the dawn of her new era as the artist continues to evolve and the first off of her upcoming record.
Peters always finds a way to put her sunshine-laden melodies underneath lyrics that seem so simple on the surface but cut deeper with each listen. "Body Better" perfectly captures the inescapable feeling of self-deprecating comparison felt by many. "Loving you was easy, that's why it hurts now," she gently sings before laying down the truth, "The worst way to love somebody is to watch them love somebody else, and it works out."
"I wrote the song last June; essentially, it's a very honest, somewhat uncomfortable in its honesty, depiction of how I was feeling at the time," Peters shared with EARMILK in an exclusive interview. "I had been through a breakup a few months before, and I was sort of processing certain feelings and how it made me feel about myself and my body. It's a song of self-reflection, the most negative version of self-reflection when you're alone and unhappy and bitter and jealous and obsessive in your hotel room at 1 am."
Peters is known for writing songs that hit a little too close to home, and "Body Better" is no different. She compares it to drafting a scathing text to someone and not sending it, then tweeting it out to the world nine months later. "The longer time goes on, the more you get over and get past whatever it was that you were writing about, and it becomes a different thing. The song gets disconnected from the moment." Vulnerability is a muscle that Peters has trained so often it's second nature to her. It feels effortless on each release. In an age when women are picked apart for every detail, this song feels especially poignant.
The comparison in those intricate details feels like a stab at every turn. Comparison gets to everyone. Maisie faces it in her career as much as she does in her personal life. She says, "I feel like there's a point in my career where I haven't achieved enough or fallen behind, or I'm not where I want to be, and none of those things are true, and they're all things that only you think about yourself." But the response she gets with each song she releases just cements her position. She perfectly sums up the female experience, the way that nothing is able to exist without that question of what if? Or why can't I be like her instead?
Everything an artist does will be held up to compare to another and picked a part piece by piece, but Peters has learned to drown out that noise. Whether it's in her career or her personal life, she says, "It's a fruitless exercise, it's only you who thinks those things, and I guarantee who you're comparing yourself to would do the same thing back to you in a heartbeat. Just remember that you're more than what you think you are. There's so much depth to us as women, and we're so multifaceted. There's a myriad of wonderful things about us. Don't get caught up on one aspect of yourself or one aspect of someone else that you think you're missing or that they have. Everyone's so much more than that."
"Body Better" is the first song off of her highly anticipated sophomore album. Peters hit the road supporting Ed Sheeran's stadium tour in New Zealand and Australia, and she'll be playing headlining shows in Japan and Singapore. She's also set to start a run of headlining shows in the UK and Europe before joining Sheeran again in North America.
