Devon Gilfillian

Time Will Tell is the album that Devon Gilfillian has been preparing to make his entire life. But some things needed to happen first—namely, he needed his life to change, for the road to wind through a few curves and over a few bumps before the classically modern and magnetic soul singer could write these songs. He needed to confront his family’s mortality. He needed to endure a relationship whose cracks nearly broke him. He needed to take control of the way he made his records, to believe that he and his closest confidants had what it took to shape the record of his life. Here’s how they did just that. You should first know that Devon’s father, Nelson Gilfillian, likes to keep it clean. A father of three now at the edge of 70, he hits the gym five times a week and generally watches what he eats. Though he raised his kids just west of Philadelphia, he lives now just east of Nashville, in the rural outskirts of Lebanon. A lifelong musician and wedding singer, Nelson’s one indulgence these days might be his Wednesday night trips into the city, where he plays congas in a weekly R&B and jazz jam at the Flamingo Cocktail Club. Devon, then, was stunned and confused when his mom called in September 2023 to say that Nelson, then 67, had suffered a heart attack. His own father had died at that age, but the prognosis for Nelson seemed much better—a few stints, then back home to Lebanon. Nelson is the reason Devon is a musician, having taken the kid to guitar lessons and fed him the great records. So the son did what he assumed the father would want: He walked onstage in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, played his show, and flew home the next morning. In a matter of weeks, Gilfillian 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. Like the sun slipping through closed curtains on a cold day, “Glad to Be Here” is the aching and grateful country-soul centerpiece of Time Will Tell, his…