Eating burgers and talking ‘Love You Anyway’ with Delco-raised psychedelic soul singer Devon Gilfillian

Since moving to Music City a decade ago, Devon Gilfillian has been a Nashvillian.

But the songwriter and guitarist from Delaware County was back home on a recent afternoon, celebrating the release of his new album, Love You Anyway.

The homecoming trip included promotional stops at WXPN-FM (88.5) and Main Street Music in Manayunk, for a Friday night performance where his new songs were put to “the campfire test,” to see if he could hold up without a backing band. (They passed.)

In between, he needed a taste of home.

“This is the spot,” Gilfillian says, settling in for an interview at his favorite restaurant, Charlie’s Hamburgers in Folsom, Pa. “It’s weird, because when I drive by my childhood home, somebody else is living there now.”

At Charlie’s, where Gilfillian was accompanied by his manager and drummer Jonathan Smalt, the singer is warmly greeted as an old friend and local hero.

“I grew up in Morton, which is a little Black neighborhood about 10 minutes down the road,” he says. Ready to take a bite out of his usual, the Peg Special — a double cheeseburger with bacon and onion — Gilfillian says: “This feels like home.”

Gilfillian has been busy touring for Love You Anyway. On Tuesday, he was in the Netherlands, opening for My Morning Jacket. Friday, he’s on a bill with Trombone Shorty, Yola, and Mavis Staples in Selbyville, Del. On June 17, it’s the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee. And he has a hometown show at the Brooklyn Bowl Philadelphia on Sept. 28.

Gilfillian, 33, is well established in Nashville. In January 2020 — on his birthday — he released his debut album, Black Hole Rainbow, which takes vintage soul and rock into daring, adventurous directions.

What should have been a breakout year was shut down by the pandemic. But it was still pivotal for Gilfillian, whose music glides across multiple genres. The label he’s most comfortable with is “psychedelic soul,” an apt description of “All I Really Wanna Do,” the candy-colored confection that leads off Love You Anyway.

The police killing of George Floyd and the unrest that followed led to a personal political awakening. He showed what a terrifically expressive singer he is by taking on a daunting project: a song by song cover version of Marvin Gaye’s classic socially conscious 1971 album What’s Going On.

In April, Gilfillian sang “What’s Going On,” joining Emmylou Harris, Margo Price, and Sam Bush at a rally in Nashville on the day Rep. Justin Jones was reinstated to the Tennessee Legislature after being expelled for speaking out in favor of gun control measures.

Gilfillian is part of a musical family. His father, Nelson, is a percussionist and singer — “Stevie Wonder is his North Star,” his son says. The elder Gilfillian played clubs and weddings with the Philly funk band Cafe Olé in the 1980s and 1990s.

He and Devon’s mother, Virginia, now live in Lebanon,Tenn. His younger brother, Ryan, an impressive soul singer in his own right, will perform at a free Disability Pride Philadelphia show on the Ben Franklin Parkway at noon Saturday.

Encouraged to play piano when he was 12, young Devon balked. Two years later, after seeing Jack Black in School of Rock, he asked his father to buy him a guitar.

“I was learning ‘Under the Bridge’ by the Chili Peppers and my dad heard it and said ‘That guy [guitarist John Frusciante] sounds like he’s been listening to some Jimi.’ I said, ‘Who’s that?’

“First he had that look of disappointment. Then he hit me with a Jimi Hendrix greatest hits record. After I heard that, my brain exploded. It was like: This is what I want to do.”

At Springfield High School, he played in bands called Black Sheep and Yet To Be Seen. Before a gig at Riddle Ale House in Media, “They asked us what our name was, and a girl said, I think they’re yet to be seen,” he recalled with a laugh. “We said: ‘That’s our name.’ ”

Gilfillian studied psychology at West Chester University while “playing three and four hour acoustic sets,” playing Otis Redding and Avett Brothers and Adele at local restaurants like Más Mexicali Cantina and Timothy’s.

He didn’t see a future with his name in lights. “I was thinking, maybe be a music therapist,” he says. After graduation, a year of AmeriCorps service landed him in Nashville.

While rehabbing homes in just-starting-to-gentrify East Nashville, he met musicians. “I put out a Craigslist ad saying I wanted to start a psychedelic Afrobeat band. I played guitar in a reggae band, and a Delta blues cover band.”

In 2015, he was a server at City Winery Nashville. One night, he was training Smalt, who had put aside doctoral work on Dostoyevsky and 19th-century Russian literature to make it as a drummer.

Smalt was knocked out by Gilfillian’s music. “He was like, ‘Dude, what are you doing? You need to write more songs and record and get them out!’ "

“We would take these meetings and if it was with a manager, I’d tell them I was his producer,” Smalt says, recalling the hustle.

A self-titled EP in 2016 led to a meeting with producer T Bone Burnett. In 2017, WXPN featured him on a World Cafe: Nashville emerging artists show. “Since then,” XPN program director Bruce Warren says, “we’ve watched him grow as a performer — his live show is great — as well as a songwriter.”

Black Hole Rainbow was produced by Shawn Everett, who’s worked with Kacey Musgraves and the War On Drugs. That album conjures a denser, more tense mood than Love You Anyway, though the new album — whose 11 songs were all cowritten by Gilfillian — was conceived in stressful times.

Love You Anyway has serious moments. The rugged “Righteous” is about trying to find a path to understanding in a divided culture. “Let The Water Flow” is an uplifting hymn cowritten with Henry Brill in response to a Georgia law making it illegal to distribute food and water to people waiting to vote.

But there’s a lightness to much of Gilfillian’s new music, from the playful “The Recipe” to the cumbia-flavored “Brown Sugar Queen,” whose video features Gilfillian’s actress girlfriend Meggan Utech.

He calls the song “an anthem to celebrate all the beautiful, thick, Black, and brown women in the world.” That song also inspired Gilfillian to sell Brown Sugar Blend coffee on his website.

The album’s title cut stubbornly sticks to a belief that love can be a unifying force to overcome hate: “We all have our storm to weather,” he sings, “But we are in this ship together.”

“I wanted to share that with this album, because there’s so much Black trauma in music and media and art,” Gilfillian says. “I want to point out the work that needs to be done, but also highlight the joy, and Black joy, in love. And just love in general. Just have that be the peanut butter, with the pill being the message of trying to bring people together.”