When country-soul singer Devon Gilfillian made his major label debut album, \u201cBlack Hole Rainbow,\u201d in 2020, he says it was an experience of diving into the recording process wholeheartedly, learning and pushing the boundaries.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat a privilege to get to make that album,\u201d Gilfillian says. He went into the iconic Electro-Vox Studio in Hollywood and recorded the songs not only on tape, but pressed them onto vinyl and sampled it onto Pro Tools to use on the finished product.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was such a crazy process.\u201d<\/p>\n
It also was successful. The disc produced three Top 12 songs on the Adult Alternative Airplay (AAA) chart, including the Top 5 \u201cThe Good Life,\u201d and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.<\/p>\n
Gilfillian says he again pushed boundaries with his new disc, \u201cTime Will Tell,\u201d released in June.<\/p>\n
This time, he says, it was in the music he wrote, blending the Philly soul sound on which he was raised in the suburb of Milton, Delaware County, with the Nashville sound he developed after moving there in 2013.<\/p>\n
\u201cTime Will Tell\u201d has had similar success, with two singles already hitting the Top 40 AAA.<\/p>\n
Gilfillian no doubt will perform songs from each disc on his \u201cTime Will Tell\u201d tour stop, 7 p.m. Sept. 20, Musikfest Cafe, ArtsQuest Center, SteelStacks, Bethlehem.<\/p>\n
Opening the concert is Jon Muq, a Uganda singer-songwriter based in Austin, Texas, who released his debut album May 31.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt just felt like a full-circle moment,\u201d Gilfillian says in a phone interview from on the road in Tennessee, where he\u2019s headed to North Carolina to kick off the \u201cTime Will Tell\u201d tour.<\/p>\n
He says \u201cBlack Hole Rainbow\u201d began in 2016 or 2017, \u201cwhen I was learning, getting into country music, and I wanted to add a little \u2018Let\u2019s take some spices out of that cabinet and put it in the soul dish.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd to me, this [new] album feels like soul with a sprinkle of some masters, you know, and that\u2019s what I wanted. That\u2019s what I wanted to combine for this album.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gilfillian certainly has a soul-infused background. When he was growing up in Milton and attending Springfield High School, his father, Nelson, was a singer and percussionist in a band that played throughout the area.<\/p>\n
In high school, Gilfillian already was playing in a band, and when he moved on to West Chester University, he performed around the area, including at M\u00e1s Mexicali Cantina.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was where I was getting my first gigs, playing some open mics,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd then eventually they gave me an hour set, actually two hours. Like, \u2018Can you fill up two hours?\u2019 I was like, \u2018Yeah!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite graduating with a degree in psychology, Gilfillian says he knew music was his future, and he joined the government community-centered aid program AmeriCorps with hopes of landing in a music town.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in a band with my friends, and they were kind of half-in, half-out, and I was like, \u2018Man, where do I go to make music happen?\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd my friends did AmeriCorps, and you know, you can go anywhere you want to go and show the people to AmeriCorps. I\u2019m like, \u2018All right.\u2019 So I signed up and applied to Boston, New Orleans and Nashville, and got accepted to the program in Nashville.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd behind that, I mean, that was truly the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n
He moved to Nashville in 2013 and in 2016 self-released a self-titled debut EP of gospel-inspired blues-rock. He was constantly absorbing what Nashville offered.<\/p>\n
\u201cNashville\u2019s, to me, is the best musical incubator in this country,\u201d he says. \u201cLike, you really learn how to write songs in Nashville. In L.A., you learn how to be a flashy performer. In New York, you learn how to be cool. And then in Nashville, you learn how to write a song.\u201d<\/p>\n
Conversely, he said the city also welcomed his Philly soul.<\/p>\n
\u201cNashville\u2019s definitely a transplant city, so every now and then I bump into Pennsylvania folks,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if I met any Delco people specifically. But it feels, like, as far as the music scene, people are hungry. Everyone\u2019s hungry. And I felt very, very welcome.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt, like, \u2018Yes, give me that soul, man.\u2019 So there\u2019s definitely a market.\u201d<\/p>\n
For \u201cBlack Hole Rainbow,\u201d label Capitol Records gave him the ability to explore those influences, he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I loved, like, every moment we got to spend,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got to spend almost a year making that album. I was in L.A. for at least a collective six months, making that album. Just thank God for Capitol Records, I was allowed to do that.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor that album, it was so involved and so fun the way that we did it. It was so, so different.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe really built everything from the ground up. We layered things, then we tracked drums, then we tracked bass, then we tracked this, then we did vocals last, and it was very, very much built.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I wanted to have a combination of those techniques, those styles of recording. Like, I wanted to record the team because I wanted to begin making the sound of the band playing together into recording, and that was important to me.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I also wanted to add, I wanted to push it and take it to more modern, push it into the future a little bit and be able to record some other things on top, plus the vocals. I got to do that. It was crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
After that, Gifillian embraced his soul roots by releasing a song-for-song cover album of Marvin Gaye\u2019s 1971 soul classic \u201cWhat\u2019s Going On\u201d in 2020, then his sophomore album, \u201cLove Your Anyway\u201d in 2023, which also had two Top 25 AAA chart songs.<\/p>\n
For the new disc, he says, he sought to merge the Philly soul he loved with the country music that stole his heart upon moving to Nashville.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Philly soul is gonna be there,\u201d he says. \u201cI love that. \u2026 The soul is in the vocals for me; that to me it feels like that classic kind of soul.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says he didn\u2019t fall in love with country music until he moved to Nashville and first heard progressive country music singer Sturgill Simpson.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy manager, he was, like, \u2018Yo, check this out,\u2019\u201d and gave him Simpson\u2019s acclaimed 2014 album \u201cMetabolic Sounds in Country Music,\u201d Gilfillian says.<\/p>\n
And I was, like, \u2018Who\u2019s this?\u2019 And my mind was like, \u2018What?\u2019 It was blown. It was like, \u2018What in the world is this?\u201d<\/p>\n
Gilfillian says it made him want to work with that disc\u2019s producer, Dave Cobb, who\u2019s been nominated for 13 Grammys, and in his studio.<\/p>\n
Gilfillian says \u201cTime Will Tell\u201d is \u201ca snapshot of my life. It\u2019s a snapshot of my diary for the past three years,\u201d including \u201cworking through a relationship that just wasn\u2019t serving to me or the other person,\u201d and dealing with his father having a heart attack.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt changed my whole perspective on life, and I was, like, \u2018What am I doing?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cThere is, there\u2019s no time to waste here, and I have to live with intention and hold the people that I love the most as high as I can, as long as I have them.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of all, really realizing how precious the time is that we get on this earth. And really, really writing from a place of that gratitude. Even though my relationship didn\u2019t work, that doesn\u2019t mean that there wasn\u2019t so much love there, and it doesn\u2019t mean I wasn\u2019t grateful for everything for that, because it really did teach me so much.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s being in the element. I wanted to capture it. I wanted it to feel raw. I wanted to feel, I wanted you to hear, the chemistry of the band in the studio. And that was important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Staying connected to the area also is important, Gifillian says.<\/p>\n
Two days before playing Musikfest Cafe, he\u2019ll play Philadelphia radio station WHYY\u2019s \u201cXponential Festival\u201d at Camden, New Jersey\u2019s Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, where one of his favorite bands, The Budos Band, whom he met during one of his previous Xponential shows, will headline.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m so excited,\u201d he says. \u201cI can\u2019t wait to get there and get up to Bethlehem. It\u2019s going to be great.\u201d<\/p>\n
Devon Gilfillian, Jon Muq, 7 p.m. Sept. 20, Musikfest Cafe, ArtsQuest Center, SteelStacks, Bethlehem. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Tickets: https:\/\/www.artsquest.org\/event\/devon-gilfillian-time-will-tell-tour\/<\/p>\n
CONTRIBUTED PHOTODevon Gilfillian, \u201cTime Will Tell\u201d tour, 7 p.m. Sept. 20, Musikfest Cafe, ArtsQuest Center, SteelStacks, Bethlehem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When country-soul singer Devon Gilfillian made his major label debut album, \u201cBlack Hole Rainbow,\u201d in 2020, he says…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287018,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120],"class_list":["post-287017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}