A look inside the wild ride of Nashville’s Devon Gilfillian
When the red truck came around the corner and into the lane of the tour van in which Devon Gilfillian was riding, he had just enough time for a couple of fleeting thoughts before the impact tore the vehicle apart.
The first was a standard reaction by most people put in a life-or-death situation: “I saw my life flash before my eyes,” he told BLANK Newspaper recently. “That was crazy.”
The second, and perhaps the takeaway that’s emblazoned across his musical soul in 50-foot letters of fire: He wasn’t ready.
No one is, of course, but for Gilfillian, whose sails are finally billowing in the headwinds of momentum, everything he had yet to accomplish, everything he still wanted to do, hung in the balance in those brief nanoseconds.
“I think the biggest lesson that brought to me was that the universe is out of your control, and that you never know when your life is going to be taken away,” said Gilfillian, who headlines the second annual Second Bell Music Festival on Aug. 17 at Suttree Landing Park in South Knoxville. “Honestly, it really put into perspective who I want to surround myself with, and who and what I want to invest my love and my energy in. It opened my eyes to what was really important in my life.
“Two days later, we jumped into a rental van and we drove to do the next show, because in a way, it was like, ‘Music was what we are meant to do, and we can let this accident knock us down or immediately jump back on the horse.’ Playing itself was healing in so many ways, but it definitely empowered me. It made me realize that we only have this life to live, and that it can be taken away at any moment. We need to play music, and we need to get this music to people.”
Fortunately, Gilfillian and his manager, Jonathan Smalt, were uninjured in the crash. Their friend and driver suffered a broken ankle and ribs, but given that the drunk driver who hit them was speeding, it could have been much worse. That he refused to let it deter him from continuing with his summer tour is a testament to both his determination and devotion, two traits that have served him well since he unlocked rock ‘n’ roll’s powerful potential with an electric guitar when he was 14.
His father was a wedding singer, so Gilfillian grew up outside of Philadelphia surrounded by music, but he was a casual fan as a child, he said. In the sixth grade, for an assignment in which he and his classmates were asked to research a potential career, Gilfillian picked music production and was awed by the potential payday for such a vocation. It was a couple of years later, however, when he “truly fell in love with music,” he said.
“The first song I learned how to play on guitar was ‘Under the Bridge’ by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and my dad heard it and said, ‘That sounds like Jimi Hendrix’ — probably because (Chili Peppers guitarist) John Frusciante was such a huge Hendrix fan,” Gilfillian said. “I said, ‘Who’s that?’ And my dad smacked me in the face with a Hendrix CD.
“I listened to that, and my brain exploded. I had to figure out how to do that with the guitar. It was like magic, like wizardry. I knew at that moment that music, if not my career, was going to be something I had to pursue with a passion.”
Around 2013, Gilfillian moved to Nashville to try his hand in the business. Unlike many of his peers, his particular sound didn’t traffic in the standard country tropes, but neither did he shut the door on them, either. Instead, he began to build a unique niche for himself that combined roots arrangements with his love of R&B, soul and the blues.
“I fell in love with country and Americana when I moved to Nashville and got to incorporate that into my music, so I feel like it was almost like a little bit of an advantage in a way,” he said. “That, and I would say also being an African-American artist in Nashville definitely made me stick out, and in a great way.”
In Music City, he fell in with a group of peers knocking incessantly on the industry’s door, each of them eager to collaborate and lift one another up. His passion and authenticity made him easy to work with, and by the time he recorded and released a self-titled 2016 EP, he sold out Nashville’s City Winery for the release show.
“There were maybe 100 people there, but I felt like, at that point, ‘Wow — I can do this. I can get people, and people want to come out and see the music,’” he said. “At that point, I was thinking, ‘We’re doing it. There’s no turning back.’”
Once Buster Phillips of William Morris Endeavor came on board as Gilfillian’s agent, he began to get traction outside of Nashville. In early 2018, he released the song “Troublemaker,” a muscular, moaning blues-rocker that blasts off with a funky slide guitar intro. It was used for marketing and programming for the 2018 NFL Draft, and Gilfillian worked with Sawn Everett, a veteran of albums by The War on Drugs and Alabama Shakes, for a full-length record he hopes to release by early 2020 on Capitol Records.
“We’re still figuring out when we want to release it,” he said. “It’s done; it’s all cooked up and ready. We’re just kind of playing the radio game and putting out singles and seeing how they do.”
Case in point: “Get Out and Get It,” which combines Afrobeat inspirations he brought home from a visit to Africa earlier this year, which ride in a pocket of groove alongside influences like Al Green and Curtis Mayfield.
In the meantime, Gilfillian comes to Second Bell fresh off a set at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival last month. In 2013, he said, he attended the gathering as a fan, before he moved to Nashville and as he was on the cusp of making music his career choice. He remembers incendiary sets by Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Trombone Shorty, among others, and his time in the audience was very much on his mind when he took the stage as a performer.
“Fast-forwarding to six years later and getting to be on the fourth stage at Newport and getting to play in front of thousands of people was full circle and amazing,” he said. “It was cool because it’s about the music there. I feel like at some festivals, it’s about the most popular artists there and whatnot, but at Newport, all of the artists are into collaborating and jamming, and you really feel it. I was reminded of why I’m in love with music.”
Devon Gilfillian will close out the second Second Bell Music Festival on August 17th. General Admission and VIP tickets are available at www.secondbellfest.com
