I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: DEVON GILFILLIAN-NonCOMM 2019 Free at Noon (May 15, 2019).

Devon Gilfillian has a fun name to say.  Beyond that I assumed he was an Irish singer-songwriter.  But in fact, he is Philadelphia-bred, and Nashville-based and he plays soul and hard rock.

WXPN has been mentioning him a lot and I see that he is just about to release his debut album.  He has a powerful voice and commands attention

Gilfillian never wasted a moment on stage, and he never shied away from showmanship either; by the time he reached the second chorus in the opener, “Unchained,” he was already belting in his strongest range. The singer’s voice shook the room, rich, full-bodied, and gorgeous.

I love the way this song seemed pretty big during the verse but took off during the chorus and took off even more in the second chorus.

“Get Out and Get It” sounds like it could have come from a 70s movie with the riffing guitars and keys.  I don’t know if the crowd clapped along to the “La Da Da di” (it’s hard to hear them) but I don’t know how they couldn’t.

The “Good Life” is all about learning to love people better.

During the R&B-inflected “The Good Life,” Gilfillian charmed the audience with sweet falsetto and plenty of smiles as he dreamed about life in a loving city. “Remember when the bank got sold, and everybody took their gold, and everybody helped each other?” he asked in the second verse.

The super fuzzed out guitar solo is pretty spectacular.

They followed it up with the ballad “Stranger,” which Gilfillian introduced with a story from the band’s time on the road: He and his beloved bandmates got into a terrible car accident in 2018 that involved a drunk driver speeding through the hills in Georgia. When the band survived and lived to travel on, Gilfillian wondered at how quickly a stranger could accidentally change the course of another person’s life. But the “stranger” the singer calls out to in the song’s chorus turns out not to be the stranger who caused the accident, but the stranger who let him live through it — his savior.

They end the show with two rocking songs.

“Come Here and Come Down” is rocking and soulful, with a great wah wah sound on the guitar.   There’s a roaring guitar solo, but it’s not quiet as roaring as the final track “Troublemaker,” their heaviest track of the afternoon.  With a simple but powerful riff that really screams for a slide guitar solo, although Gilfillian’s solo is pretty fantastic too.

[READ: May 20, 2019] “A Hundred and Eleven Years Without a Chauffeur”

This story had such a peculiar title that I couldn’t quite imagine where it would go.

It starts off discussing how our ancestors did not drool over us.  They thought of the future in only the most general terms.  Their memoirs were not the whole story.  Worse yet is if we only have a few photos.

The narrator of this story is looking for photos for a biography.  She finds her old supply of photos but she knows some are missing.  But who would steal old photos?  People might take books from a guest room but who would steal Victorian and Edwardian pictures with no artistic merit?

She remembered one of her cousin bending over a sewing machine.  Her dream was to one day own a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur.  It never happened.

She thinks about people who slept in her guest room and then she remembers Damian de Dogherty.  Damian had an interesting backstory. His family were

Huguenots originating from Ireland, taking refuge in France; members of the family were later in the service of Maria Theresa of Austria who conferred on them a princedom.  Being modest people, they accepted to be merely barons and, he, the last survivor of the family, was Baron Damian de Dogherty.

He was a lot of fun.  Well, she clarifies:

he was a lot of fun at the dinner table and of diminishing fun elsewhere.

Damian practiced as a genealogist and many of his friends were delighted when he “discovered” their noble origins.  He made many other people Barons as well.

It’s possible he believed everything he said.  He even tried to write an autobiography.

“I’ve come to the bit when my aunt Le Comtese Clementine de Vevey came to visit me at school in Switzerland”
“I believe you went to school in Salt lake City.”
“Oh that was earlier.”

Everyone loved to be with him when he was alive, but when he died there were very few mourners.

Shortly after he death, she was in a bookshop in Ghent and she came across a pile of photographs in ornate frames.  The bookshop owner said people often bought these for the frames and threw away the pictures, although he found the pictures charming.

But these pictures were not sepia faded, they were darker, modified.  The owner said he bought them in a house sale from England.  They were noble relations of the Baron de Dogherty,

She looked carefully and saw that she knew the people in the photograph.  Her humble relatives were in these pictures but with their lockets and trinkets turned into medals from the Order of the Black Eagle.

The title comes into play in a wonderful way.

This is the first story I’ve read by Muriel Spark and I really enjoyed it.