Maisie Peters’ new album The Good Witch explores the power and heartbreak that comes with taking “the very first Bambi steps into being a woman”.
There is something powerful and frightening about a heartbroken woman. I look back at my own heartbreaks over the years and the overwhelming feeling is not lethargy, but frenzy. I felt myself wrapped in a feeling of transformative rage – not really directed at anyone or anything, but white hot all the same.
Maisie Peters seems to understand this feeling.
The Divine Feminine
“It’s giving Divine Feminine,” she tells me, eyes wide. “There’s a sort of magic to it. Like, this power. In a way, I kind of miss it now. But that’s like a whole different thing.”
She’s talking about the song ‘BSC’(batshit crazy), which features on her new album The Good Witch, out today. It’s a violent, loud, heart-wrenching song, in every sense of the word. The chorus lyric “you think I’m alright — but I’m actually bloody motherfucking batshit crazy,” delivered in Maisie’s sweet, melodic voice, is perfectly juxtaposed just like a recovering heartbreak victim: thriving on the outside, tortured on the inside.
It’s a joy to speak with Maisie about her lyrics. She thinks deeply before answering each question — but when she starts speaking, the words flow so quickly it’s as though her mouth can’t quite keep up with her thoughts.
A 23-year-old, Maisie speaks in Gen-Z shorthand (she calls ‘BSC’ “the most ‘delulu’ song that’s ever existed”). This is helpful for quickly getting to the heart of her point; she lists references as though she is broadly, swiftly whipping different colours of paint across a canvas.
“What About Wendy?”
The Good Witch is Maisie Peters’ second album, the older sister to her debut You Signed Up For This – perhaps not in age, but definitely in tone. The Maisie Peters on this record is defiant, assertive, and uncannily wise. In short: she’s been through some shit.
When I listen to this record I can’t help thinking about the tweet format that recently made the rounds, pointing out that men need to take mushrooms, or go on a trip around the world in their twenties, or literally reach their deathbeds to have the same realisations that girls had alone in their bedrooms at 12 years old.
“And sometimes, you look at a path and you think, like, I could take that and it could make me happy … [‘Wendy’] is about how awfully easy it is to sleepwalk into a life that shouldn’t be yours.”
‘Wendy’, a gentle, synth-driven ballad, reflects this theory at its purest. The track uses Peter Pan and Wendy Darling as lyrical vessels for a sweet but immature boy and a clever, ambitious young woman. “If I’m not careful, I’ll wake up and we’ll be married,” Maisie almost sighs on ‘Wendy’, putting words to a sad, hopeless thought that many women her age have had to confront.
“In life, you have all these different paths, right? And it’s not as simple as ‘that’s the right one and that’s the wrong one’,” she tells me, when I ask about the inspiration behind ‘Wendy’.
“And sometimes, you look at a path and you think, like, I could take that and it could make me happy. But this song is about having the tiniest amount of wisdom and the tiniest amount of fortitude to know that whilst you could take it, you shouldn’t… [it’s about] how awfully easy it is to sleepwalk into a life that shouldn’t be yours.”
The Very First “Bambi Steps Into Womanhood”
These are hard lessons to learn. Although she says it wasn’t intentional, Maisie explains that much of the writing on The Good Witch ended up dissecting these womanly lessons. When I ask Maisie if she was explicitly reckoning with girlhood on this album, not unlike how Taylor Swift explored the concept on Speak Now in particular, she corrects me.
“My first album You Signed Up For This feels like an album that was based in girlhood,” she says. “It was a coming of age record very definitely… it was an album of the joys and the pains of being a girl, so to speak. Or at least, my experience of being a girl.”
But The Good Witch is different. “I can’t think of a better way to say it — [The Good Witch] feels like my first foray, or my very first Bambi steps into being a woman and what that entails.” In that case, perhaps it’s an album for girls on the cusp of womanhood — freshly heartbroken, standing on the precipice, wondering what to do with all of these… realisations. All that power (and the inverse lack of it).
“It’s The History Of Man…”
The album closer ‘History of Man’ is grand but restrained, as an almost resigned Maisie explains, literally, the history of man as she sees it: “The men start wars, yeah, Troy hates Helen/women’s hearts are lethal weapons/did you hold mine and feel threatened?”
“It’s very Jo March-coded,” Maisie says about ‘History of Man’. “You know, when she goes ‘oh, it’s so painful’. I can’t remember exactly what she says.”
I can see the vision — Saoirse Ronan’s Jo March, brimming with restrained emotion: “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all a woman is fit for.”
“[The Good Witch] feels like my first foray, or my very first Bambi steps into being a woman and what that entails.”
Jo March’s monologue on the complexities of women does feel very The Good Witch. This album has layers, nuance — something Maisie has embraced and spotlighted with her sharp, intuitive writing. I asked Maisie if she listened to any music in particular while she was working on this album. “I thought a lot about Melodrama by Lorde,” she tells me.
“[I thought about] the importance of it. I think I was 17, and it was so important to me and my friends. It felt like culture, and it still feels significant. I wanted to make a second album that had the impact that Melodrama had.”
It’s a perfect reference. Like The Good Witch, Lorde’s seminal Melodrama also grapples with the balance between girlhood and womanhood (intentionally or not), especially in tracks like ‘Perfect Places’ — “I’m 19 and I’m on fire/But when we’re dancing, I’m alright”.
And like Melodrama, The Good Witch feels momentous. It feels self-possessed, and holds the power to halt conversation — more than once, I found myself leaning towards my laptop speaker, trying to catch every lyric before they were gone.
It’s time for my chat with Maisie to end. She has a show to do, and I’m left to contemplate the fleeting nature of girlhood, the transformation from child to woman, the juxtaposition of internal heartbreak and front-facing zen. How do I sum up these feelings? How could I possibly put words to that journey?
I’m not sure I know how — but Maisie Peters definitely does.
Maisie Peters’ new album The Good Witch is out now. She’s set to tour Australia in March 2024, playing shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Find out more here.
Eilish Gilligan is a Melbourne-based musician and writer. She’s on Twitter at @eilishgilligan. Hero Image: Warner Music