Sunday 17 February 2019

New Music: Maisie Peters - Stay Young


In the UK this week the opening song on the official Spotify New Music Friday playlist isn’t, as is usually the case, a big pop superstar (they follow in positions 2 to 5 with a variety of collaborations from the likes of Cardi B, Bruno Mars, Yungblud, Halsey, Travis Barker, Zedd and Katy Perry) but a relatively new artist. Whilst we all probably understand that to hook someone in to a playlist you do have to put some big names at the front, I’d like to see Spotify do more of this and take a few risks with lesser known artists at the top of their big weekly playlists. 

Having said that in terms of playlists the artist in question (Maisie Peters) isn’t really a total unknown. Her song Worst of You now nearly has 25 million streams and Place We Were Made now has just under 22 million. She’s hardly one of those artists with a less than 1,000 symbol streams next to her playlist statistics, is she? However, we are now living in an era where certain artists have millions of streams on Spotify but cannot draw 50 people to a gig. Thankfully Maisie doesn’t seem to be one of them with her online success slowly transferring to real life; her show at Omeara (320 capacity) in London next month is already sold out and she has a gig at the much bigger Scala (800 capacity) planned for May. Perhaps naming her as One to Watch for 2018 as I did back in 2017 (here) was a tiny bit early, but it wasn’t a bad tip was it?

The song in question topping the New Music Friday playlist is called Stay Young (which let's be honest is a physical impossibility) and it’s possibly her most pop leaning tune to date with a proper big old catchy chorus and a modern radio friendly production. Maisie has described the track as: “A song about growing up and being lonely in Willesden Green, chasing my dreams and missing my friends and wanting to make them proud.” 

Even if you don’t bother with the New Music Friday playlist this is worth pressing play on.
There’s a video for the song as well and as we all know one thing that is almost guaranteed to get a lot of views and likes on the internet is a cat and so Maisie duly obliges here. 

Maisie Peters - Stay Young


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