Maisie Peters didn’t experience a breakup with Cate’s brother because there was no breakup—it never happened.
The English singer confessed that she never dated, or even met, the sibling of her reported friend Cate Canning when she wrote her hit 2022 song “Cate’s Brother.”
The song features Maisie singing about inviting 40 friends to her Halloween party, among them Cate, who played a pivotal role in introducing her to her brother. “Cate had had family stay from Canada / ‘Maisie, did you meet my brother?'” the lyrics begin. “And then he started coming over / And my heart went, ‘Love him, he’s the one and we shall wed.'”
The track ends with her meeting his mom: “That’s when I became his only girl / And now I date Cate’s brother.”
However, the amusing backstory behind the track showcases that Maisie is more than just your typical rockstar.
“I wrote that song, because I’d had this Halloween party and I had a friend called Cate, and we had this whole joke in my friendship group that I loved her brother,” the 23-year-old revealed on the Sept. 29 episode of the Zach Sang Show. “But he’d just left London. He’d been staying with her and he’d just left. I was like, ‘You should have brought him to the party.'”
Describing her muse as an “icon,” Maisie shared that the “funny idea” to write a song stemmed from an inside joke among her friends.
“I was getting all these facts from Cate, like, ‘What does he do?'” she recalled. “I was basically doing it for the bit. It was for the girls and it was for the bit—really, it was for the group chat.”
However, Maisie, Ed Sheeran’s protégé, did end up running the lyrics by the actual person involved.
“Obviously, I did text Cate’s brother and I said, ‘Hello, I’ve written this song,'” she shared. “I sent it to him and I was like, ‘Honestly, like you seem great, you just keep living your life. Like, sorry if it’s a bit random.'”
Despite their eventual in-person meeting and Maisie offering a glowing review, the two won’t be creating a love story reminiscent of a John Hughes movie anytime soon.
“We shotgunned a beer together,” Maisie noted. “He’s literally a bro. That’s honestly true. That’s the whole story. He’s a bro. I’m a bro. We will never kiss on the mouth and that’s that.”