Steve Bell

Steve Bell, a Canadian-born artist working in the Christian folk idiom, launched his career inside a family gospel ensemble that accompanied his father, a Baptist minister acting as chaplain inside federal prisons. Inmates provided his earliest guitar lessons. Following high school he worked the club circuit with several obscure groups before entering the better-known Elias, Schritt & Bell. Years of touring eventually produced a crisis of faith, prompting him in 1988 to step away from performance and devote himself to raising his children at home.

The pause allowed renewed focus on songwriting, and at the urging of his mentor Father Bob MacDougall he cut his debut CCM album, Comfort My People. Issued on the Signpost imprint he founded with producer Dave Zeglinski, the record’s reception drew him back into music full-time. Later projects such as Deep Calls to Deep, Burning Ember, and The Feast of Seasons steadily expanded his audience.

Romantics & Mystics, his first Peg Music release, captured the 1997 Juno for Best Gospel Album. Two years afterward Rhythm House Records brought out Beyond a Shadow and, in the same year, the live set Steve Bell Band in Concert. Returning to Signpost, he delivered 2000’s Simple Songs, which earned his second Juno, this time for Best Album; its successor, Waiting for Aiden, received a Best Gospel Album nomination.

In 2003 Bell recorded Sons & Daughters alongside his daughter Sarah Bell. At the request of a friend facing terminal cancer he assembled the 2005 compilation Solace for Seasons of Suffering, pairing it with an additional disc containing interviews and book reviews on suffering and grief. The covers collection My Dinner with Bruce: Songs of Bruce Cockburn and Story and Song, Vol. 1 both appeared in 2006.

Bell joined the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra for 2007’s Symphony Sessions, on which he also played guitar and mandolin while band members contributed bass, piano, and drums. He closed the decade with 2008’s Devotion, which earned a 2010 Juno nomination for Contemporary Christian/Gospel Album of the Year.

His sixteenth album, Kindness, arrived in 2011. The holiday record Keening for the Dawn appeared the following year, and in fall 2014 he marked twenty-five years of releases with the four-disc Pilgrimage retrospective. The 2015 album I Will Not Be Shaken accompanied the book I Will Not Be Shaken: A Songwriter’s Journey Through the Psalms, written with Jamie Howison. Where the Good Way Lies, tracked on analog equipment, surfaced in 2016 and garnered another Contemporary Christian/Gospel Album of the Year Juno nomination.