Audio engineer, producer, and singer songwriter Delanie Leyden recently sat down with Headliner to talk about her career to date, including her extensive work with US rap legend Busta Rhymes on his latest album project, Blockbusta.
Starting out as an intern for The Music Development Agency at NYC’s The Cutting Room in 2015, Leyden wasted no time in landing a gig at Premier Studios the following year. Here she honed her engineering skills considerably, assisting sessions for the likes of DJ Khaled, Meek Mill, Ray J and Rick Ross, and working under some top engineers in the business, such as Ricky St. Hilaire, Los Vives and Gonzalo Contreas.
Leyden soon became one of the main assistant engineers for Busta Rhymes until 2018, and started to engineer for the rap star full time when she moved over to Penthouse Recording Studios as assistant studio manager.
“It's so funny,” she begins with a wry smile. “We had a little group of us that worked at Premier, and my producer, who was the manager at the time, was assisting sessions for Busta. He was running late, and so it was between me and my other friend Jimmy, who couldn’t stay for the session. So Gonzalo, who was Busta’s engineer at the time, and who was one of my mentors, asked me to take the session. I was like, ‘why not?’ because I had nothing else really going on at the time.
“When Busta saw me for the first time he was like, ‘this is the assistant?’ - he’s a little bit hesitant with new people, and he was expecting someone else. They liked me and wanted me in the room, so I started assisting pretty much daily. Now I sit next to him every day!”