Erin Cobby speaks to the burgeoning talent Maya Delilah, discussing her time at BRIT school, not being scared to experiment and how to deal with the lack of female guitarists in an industry still largely controlled by men.
Joan Jett. Bonny Raitt. Nancy Wilson. Despite these women being counted as household names, the prevalence of female guitarists, especially electric guitarists, in the music industry is still alarmingly low. However, there’s one young up and comer who is trying to change all that.
Meet Maya Delilah, a Londoner who started making a name for herself as a session musician before a chance encounter meant she started releasing songs solo.
Growing up, Maya lived in a pretty musical household. With parents who loved to travel and bring the sounds of the places they visited home with them, Maya was exposed to music from South America and East Africa alongside the likes of Prince, Stevie Wonder and Joni Mitchell. This familial influence continues to this day, with an active family WhatsApp group entitled ‘tune of the day’ and seasonal gatherings around the piano every year.
Maya didn’t begin her own instrumental career on the guitar, however. “I’d been learning the piano and the French horn, but couldn’t get into them,” she tells me over Zoom. This aversion wasn’t due to a lack of interest, however, but rather a late dyslexia diagnosis. “Reading sheet music didn’t work for me, as I couldn’t always see black on white”, she explains.

Things didn’t click therefore until she found a teacher who was up for abandoning the school-like structure and decided to teach Maya guitar by ear. “We used the odd chord chart and that was it,” she explains. “But it made it never feel like a chore, my parents never had to ask me to practice.”
Things kicked up a gear when Maya started to attend BRIT school, a music and arts institution which boasts the likes of Adele, Amy Winehouse and Kate Nash as alumni. “I had been at a Christian uniformed girls school,” she tells me, “where you couldn’t really express yourself unless you were in dance class.” Things couldn’t have been more different at BRIT. “On my first day my sister told me I couldn’t turn up in what I was wearing,” she tells me laughing, “but when I got there [in dungarees and a Hawaiian shirt] I wasn’t even the most eccentrically dressed by far.”
This creativity wasn’t just confined to dress code, however. “Everyone thinks BRIT might be really competitive, like Glee or something,” says Maya, “But everyone is so nice and keen to collaborate.” This energy has followed her beyond school, and now most of her band and team, including EP cover artist, is made up of school friends.
Throughout her school career, Maya stuck to playing guitar, and it was while she was working as a session musician for Millie Turner, Millie’s producer approached Maya about working with her independently.
It didn’t take long for Maya to release her first track, ‘Tangerine Dream’, a soulful and undulating track whose guitar riffs don’t let the listener forget how Maya started her music career. In contrast, Maya’s most recent release, ‘Begin Again’, is more considered, a song which meditates on life’s cyclical nature and features a breathtaking guitar solo by Maya. I ask her what’s beginning again for her right now. “As an artist, you always have to be in the headspace that you have to reinvent yourself in some way,” she tells me after a pause. “You have a project, and it comes to an end, and you have to start a whole new idea. I’m in that space right now.”

Considering her comment on reinventing herself, I ask Maya if she feels her music styling has changed a lot since her first release. “So much,” she says emphatically. “For a long time, I was trying to produce something that wasn’t really me. I was 19 and trying to squeeze all of my inspirations into one sound.” She says this was due to pressure she felt when she was starting out. “It’s preached to you to find a distinctive sound and not stray from it,” she explains, “but as someone who is so easily inspired by different sounds, I found that really hard. In my latest project, I’ve just removed that pressure. If I wanted to write a funk song or a country song, I let myself do that. It’s made out of a mix of completely different styles, which I think is pretty scary; fun, but scary.”
I ask Maya if she thinks that the pressure that she felt to stay in one lane is more often experienced by women in the industry. “100%,” she says quickly, “There’s such a thing about how women are expected to behave. It’s so much worse for a woman to do something unexpected than a man.” With this in mind, I ask if she’s got any advice for young women aspiring to achieve something similar to what she has. “Surround yourself with generous musicians who don’t want to just show themselves off, but bring you up as well,” she says. “People can be threatened when there’s a female guitarist and potentially put you down in order to steal the spotlight. Just know that you deserve to be there also.”
And this advice seems to have served Maya well. This year’s accolades include being flown out to Paris to perform at the Olympics and supporting the indie-pop group Fizz on their UK tour. As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Maya what intentions she’s bringing into 2024. “I want to worry less about commercial pressure,” she states, “I want to just make music for music’s sake and see what happens from there.” These words reaffirm my view of a woman not afraid to stick her neck out. Guitar neck, that is.

Maya Delilah recently announced the release of The Long Way Round. While the 12 songs on The Long Way Round are steeped in soul-pop, they also contain rich strains of country and blues, hints of gospel and choral music, and one full serving of unvarnished funk with the flirty new single ‘Squeeze’. “This album is a combination of so many parts of me,” says Maya. “I get so influenced by different genres, people, places, and experiences that it’s always felt hard for me to fit my music into a consistent sound or mood. It took me a long time (hence The Long Way Round) to realize that it’s a beautiful thing to have a body of work that explores so many different influences.”
Making the album was also a literal journey, from a barn-based studio in Devon, England, to a home studio in Los Angeles, and back to various rooms across London. All with a cast of friends new and old, including producers Peter Miles, Josh Grant, Doug Schadt, Seth Tackaberry, and Aquilo’s Ben Fletcher and Tom Higham, as well as collaborators including Samm Henshaw, Grace Lightman, members of FIZZ, organist Cory Henry, and drummer Aaron Sterling (John Mayer, Taylor Swift).
“My biggest hope is that the album feels nostalgic to someone I’ve never met before,” says Maya.
Her debut album ‘The Long Way Round‘ will be released on March 28th via Decca, Blue Note/Capitol.