Stephanie Marcellé is many things: a graduate of Loyola’s “ Popular and Commercial Music Program,” the daughter of musician Steven Boyd, (a prolific musician who shared the stage with Chaka Khan, The Temptations, and other soul and funk legends, who passed when Marcellé was 12), a songwriter, a businesswoman, and much more. With her impressive resume and catchy pop vocal stylings, you could say she is one-hell-of-an-artist herself.
Soft-spoken at first, Marcellé refuses to define herself as one thing: a victim.
Photo by Victoria Conway
Before transferring to Loyola, Marcellé was sleeping in her freshman dorm in the adjacent campus of Tulane University, when an intoxicated stranger entered her bedroom and sexually assaulted her. Marcellé’s room was connected to her suitemates’ room via an adjoining bathroom which could only be locked from the inside, forcing students to sleep with their doors unlocked and leaving them vulnerable to break-ins. This was how the perpetrator, who turned out to be another Tulane freshman, entered her room, a design flaw the university refused to take responsibility for. Now in the midst of what most would consider the legal battle of a lifetime, Marcellé is finding time to not only release one song per month during the year of 2021 that speaks to her trauma. Simultaneously, she is working to bring awareness to the horrors of sexual assault.
In 2015, drawing upon her own experience, Stephanie Marcellé started stopsexualassault.org with her mother, gave the keynote speech at New Orleans’ Take Back the Night March Against Sexual Violence in 2018, educated students as a panelist at the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault (LaFASA) Prevention Conference in 2019, and planted awareness through news publications. Marcellé’s 2018 keynote was powerfully delivered, and her strength moved all in attendance. The artist hopes that her story will inspire hope in other survivors, and that her music will guide listeners to stopsexualassault.org. Therefore, her album is both an artistic expression of healing and a call to action for allies of survivors. The album’s title reflects the idea that a survivor must discover how to become a whole person in order to heal, something Marcellé’s mother told her.
And yet, somehow, in a true demonstration of Ovid’s philosophical statement: “Some day this pain will be useful to you,” Marcellé is transforming her experience in a body of musical art quite literally titled HUMAN.
“I’m really hoping that, by being myself, I can help survivors see themselves as themselves as well,” says Marcellé. “I want to show them that nothing is wrong with them, and I want to show them that this is just one part of their life. It has a significant impact on pretty much every other part of their life, but they have so many other experiences and so many other things about them, and they have so many things that they can hope for and they can strive for.
“When I started going through this, my mother kept reminding me that God is always with me, that along with her, I always had him to lean on and help me through everything and so I really just leaned into my faith in him and was finding how I could see beauty in any and everything. And in that very dark situation, I saw that I was still strong enough to get through that, and I believe that was a very beautiful thing.”
Growing up as the daughter of a musician, Marcellé was influenced by her parents both in music and in life. The young musician credits her parents with giving her the strength of courage and faith to survive such a dark time. Her father played in a multitude of shows and as a young kid, Stephanie would remember his many tours and flights for gigs and concerts. It was only a matter of time when her father’s love for blasting the musical cords would soon guide her own passion towards becoming a singer-songwriter.
Even though her father is not physically here, Marcellé says, “I hear him in his music.” Boyd’s upbeat tunes inspired the tone of her upcoming album, especially its first single, “Legs,” an up-tempo Mardi Gras song which celebrates the levity of New Orleans culture while simultaneously exploring the darker perspective of a survivor who feels unsafe in a crowd of parade goers.
As a child, Marcellé was also influenced by her mother, who would play gospel R&B music from artists ranging from Mary Mary to Yolanda Adams. Even as a young girl, Marcellé was inspired by the pop and musical lyricism of artists like J-Lo, Beyonce, or Destiny’s Child and appreciated whenever she had the chance to listen to them on the radio.
“My purpose in calling the project HUMAN is to acknowledge how you have to become a whole person. It’s the goal to become a whole person after experiencing that and needing to heal. A big thing that my mother would tell me constantly as I was going through stuff is, ‘ I want you to heal, reach wholeness, I want you to have wholeness’. “ With this project, I was using each song to demonstrate a part of becoming whole, and finding myself again. Learning who you are and owning yourself again, feeling like you are you instead of feeling like you are this person that this terrible thing happened to. And so, each song is named after a body part. I got my arm back, now what part am I going to get now? I’m going to get my legs back or I’m gonna get my heart back. All of these different things that make a person a person, or at least what you can physically see a person as. I am using the songs to show how someone can get their different parts together.”
Stephanie Marcellé encourages listeners to go to Stopsexualassault.org/music where they can stream stream and buy downloads of the songs from her website. “I’m giving 20 percent of my profit from HUMAN to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, in honor of the 1 in 5 women who are sexually assaulted in college. I recently updated stopsexualassault.org to allow people to spend however much they want ($1 or higher) on a song download,” she states.
Follow Stephanie’s social media journey at @musicbymarcelle.
Alliyah Gauthier a senior at Loyola studying English Writing. Her interests are journaling, fashion, and learning about different cultures. Follow Alliyah on Instagram @alliyah_gauthier.
Grace Hawkins is a senior at Loyola University studying music business and French. In addition to being a local music fanatic, her interests include baking, reading, and traveling. Grace is on instagram @g._.hawk.
