Soul sonsgtress Patrice Isley will release "Take Me In Your Arms" on Friday, September 25. The label putting it out is not in Houston, where she was born and raised, and not in Los Angeles, where she spent years singing behind other people. It is Expansion Records, a soul independent label operating out of the UK since the mid-1980s. The forthvoming song is a mid-tempo ballad, written by David Kent, whose credits include songs for Soul Sisters The Musical under director Angie Le Mar.

Isley has a five-octave range and a resume most listeners have heard without knowing it. She studied vocal performance under David Lee Brewer after Marquette University, then spent years in session and background work, including vocals behind Teddy Pendergrass and Barry White. Her credits run across more than thirty artists, among them Gladys Knight, Philip Bailey, El DeBarge, Jermaine Dupri and Coolio. She has sung at the Grammy Awards, on The Tonight Show, on Soul Train and on Arsenio Hall. Her father played Sam Cooke and gospel quartets in the house and her mother played Barry White and Barbra Streisand.

Her solo career started in 2016 with Believe in Love, and the record that moved the needle came seven years later. Her version of "Harvest for the World," released through Expansion on October 7, 2023, reached No. 2 in the UK. She followed it with "Free," which topped a UK regional chart in early 2024, and "Patrice's Groove" with Spyro Gyra keyboardist Tom Schuman, which reached No. 11 on the Smooth Jazz chart. Every one of those results happened four thousand miles from the country she lives in.

Expansion has been building that distance into a business model for forty years. Richard Searling and John Anderson started the label in 1984, its first twelve-inch arrived in 1986, and Ralph Tee came aboard in 1989 and has co-run it since. The roster reads like a list of American singers who made their best-known records for major labels and then kept working somewhere else. Leon Ware, Stephanie Mills, Leroy Hutson, Angie Stone, Gwen McCrae, Howard Hewett, Keni Burke, Lenny Williams, Evelyn "Champagne" King, Maysa, Adriana Evans and Frank McComb have all released through it. The label states its case plainly on its own website, saying it exists to provide "quality soul largely abandoned by US labels".

The clearest version of the pattern is Jarrod Lawson, a Portland singer whose first overseas show was at Ronnie Scott's in London in 2014. He recorded at BBC Maida Vale and won Soul Artist of the Year at the Jazz FM Awards. He built an international career from a British foothold while remaining, in his own country, a regional act. Isley is running the same route in a different order, having already done the session work and the television, and the UK is where the solo records are landing.

The RIAA reported US recorded music revenue up 6.9 percent in the first half of 2026, with physical formats up 25.9 percent and sync up 18.2 percent. Paid subscriptions, where R&B revenue actually lives, grew 6.4 percent. With those results, a soul singer with a five-octave range and no streaming-era hit is a poor fit for American majors. She is a good fit for a label selling vinyl and compilation series to a British audience that has bought this music without interruption since the Northern Soul era.

The other route out is the one Lalah Hathaway took with Made In Chicago, financing and releasing through her own company with independent distribution. Isley took the one that ends with a British songwriter, a UK release date and a catalog number from a label four thousand miles from her house.

"Take Me In Your Arms" arrives September 25.