Devon Gilfillian announces "Time Will Tell"!
- Available now at your local independent record retailer or wherever you buy or stream music.
- See Devon live at Cat's Cradle Backroom on September 14th.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, one of America’s great soul music hubs, Gilfillian has since spent over a dozen years in Music City. Recorded at the legendary RCA Studio A, Time Will Tell finds Gilfillian crafting a hybrid of the Philly soul he was raised on and the Nashville sounds he’s absorbed since moving there in 2013. The result is a magnetic take on country-soul, Gilfillian’s very own Nashville sound. But first, he had to wind his way through familial mortality, the heartache of a lost relationship, and ultimately take control of his musical destiny.
First came the shock of hearing his father Nelson, a man who hits the gym five times a week and generally watches what he eats, had suffered a heart attack. Nelson Gilfillian is fine now, but in a matter of weeks after the heart attack, his son wrote “Glad to Be Here,” a bittersweet and beautiful ode to existence – to slowing down long enough to remember what a gift it is to be alive at all.
Gilfillian and his longtime drummer and friend Jonathan Smalt intuitively understood that the best way to capture the feelings in these songs was to cut them as quickly as possible. Gilfillian and Smalt have worked with several ace producers in the past, including Shawn Everett and Jeremy Lutito, but they felt like they finally knew enough to try it themselves.
“Black Dog Rabbit Hole” is a riveting hard rock snapshot of mania, Gilfillian’s voice switching between falsetto frailty and a tormented bellow as he tries to find his way out of a spiral. Gilfillian has never made anything quite so raw, quite so cutting. On “IRL,” where a boom-bap beat undergirds an organ’s psychedelic whirr before the whole thing snaps into a funk strut, Gilfillian gets stuck in the conflict between leaving and staying, between indulging what his body wants and his mind needs. The song is so unmitigated it feels like you’re listening to a real-time argument he’s having with himself about his future. These aren’t breakup songs so much as exacting maps of Gilfillian’s relatable inner conflicts as he tries to find ways to be happy—ways of being, like his father, simply glad to be here at all.
Connect with Devon here.