Touring North America, Maisie Peters comes of age

NEW YORK

With British pop singer Maisie Peters' tour across North America underway, there's one city she's particularly looking forward to playing: Sacramento, California.

Why? The Greta Gerwig effect.

“That’s like a ‘Lady Bird,’ Greta Gerwig pilgrimage,” Peters told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “So I’m excited for that.”

Peters’ tour in the U.S. and Canada follows the June release of her sophomore album “The Good Witch.” Interwoven are five dates opening for Ed Sheeran, who signed Peters to his Gingerbread Man Records in 2021, and whom she has already opened for in Europe and Australia. But New York’s Radio City Music Hall presented a new achievement — her biggest headlining show so far.

“It was very surreal, it was like a real moment,” Peters, 23, said in a Zoom call ahead of her show in Montreal. “Not many artists get to do something like that.”

That moment was one Tina Hizon, Peters’ keyboardist and friend of more than five years, had been anticipating.

“I felt quite emotional when we were on stage,” Hizon told the AP. “Like, oh, we’ve come a long way.”

These are hardly the biggest crowds Peters and her band have seen — they played Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in June and Chicago’s Lollapalooza, their first U.S. festival, earlier this month. Two shows at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, with Sheeran in March, brought in a record 215,000 fans.

But this tour is their own. And it is a celebration of “The Good Witch,” an album Peters says she feels “at peace with,” because it accomplished her goal: reflecting who she is now.

It is also music that easily soundtracks what people online have fondly labeled the “summer of girlhood” — a celebration of all things nostalgic and angsty, pink and sequined, emotional and overly analytical

“It’s the classic teenage girl in their 20s, fun. And I’m such a teenage girl in my 20s,” she said of her shows, using the tongue-in-cheek phrase that's been the subject of thousands of tweets and TikToks, often referencing fandoms, avoidant adulting and nostalgia. In the best way possible, she says, the shows feel “like a birthday party when you’re in middle school.”