Maz O'Connor

Maz spent her teenage years singing in folk clubs, and in 2014 was the recipient of a BBC Performing Arts Fund Fellowship (Adele was a previous recipient) which paired her as an emerging artist in residence with The English Folk Dance and Song Society. During this year she wrote, recorded and released her album ‘This Willowed Light’, which earned her a nomination for the BBC Radio 2 Folk Horizon Award and appearances at high profile festivals such as Cambridge Folk Festival, WOMAD and Glastonbury. The Guardian called it ‘folk album of the year thus far’. Maz began to explore her own songwriting further, addressing themes of Millennial angst in her second album ‘The Longing Kind’, about which Songlines wrote: 'There is an inquiring intelligence as well as an emotional sensibility at work here…she plays and sings beautifully *****'. She toured the U.K. and Europe, including opening for such artists as David Gray, Thomas Dybdahl and Rosanne Cash.

Her background in folk continues to inform her storytelling and feminist themes are a constant in her work: from the song ‘Derby Day’, which she was commissioned to write about Emily Wilding Davison and the feminist re-telling of the creation myth ‘Mississippi Woman’ (both on her first album ‘This Willowed Light’), to the songs giving voice to women in portraits who have been silenced as muses (on her second album ‘The Longing Kind’).

She considers new album ‘Chosen Daughter’ - a collection of darker, story songs - a bigger, more concentrated feminist statement. It is not protest music, but a very personal album which explores, and celebrates, the feminine.