Maya Delilah is sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back against a couch, her Maton electric guitar across her lap. Flames from a dozen white candles flicker as her fingers dance along the fretboard, her technical dexterity and easy versatility impressive, even on this time-snatched Instagram post.

A few hours previously, the north London-born-and-based artist, 25, had been chatting to me about the pros and cons of social media, the medium that helped make her name, her upbeat, brightly styled videos and cross-genre songs, which include shimmers of blues, pop and jazz, funk, rock and country, going viral at a time when we had more space to notice, like really notice, talent.

“I had a bit of an insane work ethic during lockdown.” Delilah flashes a smile. “I’d get up at 8 am and work until 7 pm while everyone else was not doing very much. I’d released my first single two months before the pandemic began. I had a whole lot of other music I was proud of and needed people to care about. I didn’t want to just disappear into the ether.”

The intense work ethic paid off in the end. Most of her online fame came through self-produced videos, most of which involved a green screen, her dad’s iPhone and a fertile imagination. “I was releasing videos like crazy, and got signed [to Blue Note] on the back of those.”

Her live streams, too, showcased a charismatic performer with soul-pop sensibilities and axe chops to do her idols John Mayer, Prince and Norah Jones proud. The second of two daughters born to music-obsessive parents working in film, Delilah grew up vibing to her parents’ record collection, to Aretha, Ella and Curtis, to Stevie, Santana, Nick Drake. Herbie’s “Cantaloupe Island” and “Watermelon Man” stayed on repeat, alongside music from Latin America and East Africa, whose intricate guitar harmonies inspired the loop pedal she uses when performing solo.

While having received her first guitar, a Fender, at eight years old, going on to play in a teenaged jazz band and dabble in finger-picked banjo, Delilah had struggled to decipher sheet music and tabs. Aged 16, she was diagnosed as dyslexic. “Mega dyslexic, in the top three percent,” she says with a shrug. For a while she thought about a career as a dancer; dancing, like art, is also something she’s great at. But then she started learning by ear with her music teacher, Paul (“I loved it; it was never a chore”). Using her ultra-long fingernails instead of a pick, as she does now, she practiced every moment she could.

“I used to be left out of things a lot at primary and high school, which was hard for me,” she says. “But I remember hearing an interview with John Mayer where he talked about being the kid who was never invited to parties, so he just stayed home and played guitar. I related – I was that person as well.”

Additionally blessed with a pure, warm voice and wide-ranging register, Delilah enrolled in music studies at the Brit School, the performing and creative arts college whose alumni include Adele, Amy Winehouse and FKA twigs. “On my first day there it turned out that all the guys on my course were electric guitarists, and the girls were mainly singers who, if they played an instrument at all, played acoustic guitar. I was like, ‘God, this is so stereotypical and gross.'”

“So, I went straight down to Denmark Street” – the famed music alley off Tottenham Court Road in central London – “and I bought a really stupid rock guitar that I stuck with until eventually I found a rare electric Maton, which is an Australian brand that mainly makes acoustic and is my absolute favorite.”

She co-composed songs with songwriter friends (“I can go for ten hours when I’m bouncing ideas off people”) and kept posting and performing, warming up her voice with rounds of Michael Bublé’s “Everything” (“He sings in my exact low and high register”). Two self-released EPs, “Oh Boy” (2020) and “It’s Not Me, It’s You” (2021), had their traction bolstered by those viral videos; the retro-sassy “Break Up Season” featuring Samm Henshaw, for example, garnered over 50 million views. In 2022, Delilah made her soft debut on Blue Note, reinterpreting Cassandra Wilson’s take on Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” for the popular cover compilation “Blue Note Re:imagined II“.

Blue Note was a label she was familiar with, legacy of her formative listening to Norah, Herbie and the wealth of classic vinyl in her parents’ collection. But she’d only recently learned about Blue Note president Don Was – “I’d been watching a John Mayer documentary with a section on Don, who’d produced a lot of his records and was just very cool” – when she received a call the next day telling her Was wanted to speak to her with a view to signing her.

“It was such weird timing. He’d seen a video of mine on TikTok, a random one of me playing guitar that my A&R people had sent him. It was amazing but I felt quite stressed since I’m inspired by so many different genres and sounds. When I set out to make the album I was like, ‘God, what is this going to be?’ But Don told me to make an album with all the genres, sounds and moods that I love, and the consistent thing will be my voice and guitar playing.”

Welcome, then, to “The Long Way Round”, a sublime and varied collection of tracks with light and shade, emotion and nuance. Tracks that feature guitar riffage worthy of Delilah’s 2024 endorsement as a Fender Next Artist (“A bucket list thing for me”) and run the gamut of feeling. Take the introspective “Maya Maya Maya”, a song about a recovering people pleaser, or the funky and flirty “Squeeze”, the earwormy result of a tequila-fuelled jam. Or “Actress”, a song with its own old-school sample; “Necklace”, whose catchy lyrics nail the tension in life’s contradictions, and the countrified “Man of the House”, a sweetly laconic ode to love.

There’s more, of course. Much more. On the record, in the bag, yet to come.

“It took me a long time to realise it’s a beautiful thing to have a body of work that explores so many different influences,” says Delilah. “This album is a combination of all the different parts of me. And my plan is to just keep on making albums for as long as I can, for however long it takes.”

---

Jane Cornwell is an Australian-born, London-based writer on arts, travel and music for publications and platforms in the UK and Australia, including Songlines and Jazzwise. She’s the former jazz critic of the London Evening Standard.

---

_{Header image: Maya Delilah. Photo: Rae Farrow.}

---