Soulful Femme - It Is Well With My Soul (2021)

When you’re so used to endlessly performing and a global pandemic takes that all away, what’s there left to do? For Pittsburgh-based blues duo Soulful Femme, the newly allotted free time gave them the perfect excuse to finally cut an album for the first time in their years-long existence as a band. It Is Well With My Soul feels like anything but the last-ditch efforts to make up for lost time, however, and instead feels like something entirely plotted and planned within its presence.

As far as debut albums go, the tier that It Is Well With My Soul resides upon isn’t one most would be lucky to call their home; the certainty and confidence that this initial release exudes isn’t something most bands can harness with their first times out, let alone polish so cleanly. At best, this feels like most mainstream acts’ third album after fully finding their footing. It’s worth reminding that Soulful Femme isn’t some recently-discovered TikTok stars or kids fresh out of high school. No, Soulful Femme is far from novices in the music industry, and this official debut will certainly attest to this fact.

Formed by Stephanie “Stevee” Wellons and Cheryl Rinovato, Soulful Femme is only new in the sense that this is the first fully-recorded LP that they’ve managed to wrestle together. Rinovato has years on her resume as a studio guitarist after gaining a priceless education from the Berklee College of Music, and Wellons has over two decades of experience performing for a variety of bands across the Tri-State Area, including one under her name. The fact that It Is Well With My Soul took this long to finally release only contributes to the air of “unearthed, lost album” that it kinda wears on its sleeve.

If you were to play this for me and tell me it was something recorded in the 1970s that only just recently got discovered in all of its soulful and funky glory, I’d more than likely believe you. This is an album and a band that feels timeless but the fact that they’re able to exist now in an era of online distribution and recording is certainly a plus as far as achieving a wider reach goes. The prospect of hearing songs like “Bitter Taste,” which bolsters a deeply-layered composition and fantastic melody in Wellons’ vocals over a pleasant piano and guitar accompaniment, off of this album live is an intriguing prospect now that live shows are slowly trickling back into being a reality; it’s almost a certainty that Soulful Femme will rise to the occasion. On the other end of the spectrum, the blues and jazz are in full swing with back-to-back tracks “Born To Blues” and “Trouble,” which will certainly lend themselves to an upswing in energy as they do within the album itself.

Wellons and Rinovato feel fully established as Soulful Femme with It Is Well With My Soul in the bag; the hope from this listener is that they use the material for a modest tour and push physical copies of the CD so that they’re able to hopefully record a new piece of the Soulful Femme discography soon, but this wish ultimately feels futile with the knowledge that Soulful Femme will never do what one might expect from them. Regardless, audiences can rest assured that wherever the band decides to pivot next will be a place worth following them to. ~John McCall