When country-soul singer Devon Gilfillian made his major label debut album, “Black Hole Rainbow,” in 2020, he says it was an experience of diving into the recording process wholeheartedly, learning and pushing the boundaries.

“What a privilege to get to make that album,” Gilfillian says. He went into the iconic Electro-Vox Studio in Hollywood and recorded the songs not only on tape, but pressed them onto vinyl and sampled it onto Pro Tools to use on the finished product.

“It was such a crazy process.”

It also was successful. The disc produced three Top 12 songs on the Adult Alternative Airplay (AAA) chart, including the Top 5 “The Good Life,” and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.

Gilfillian says he again pushed boundaries with his new disc, “Time Will Tell,” released in June.

This time, he says, it was in the music he wrote, blending the Philly soul sound on which he was raised in the suburb of Milton, Delaware County, with the Nashville sound he developed after moving there in 2013.

“Time Will Tell” has had similar success, with two singles already hitting the Top 40 AAA.

Gilfillian no doubt will perform songs from each disc on his “Time Will Tell” tour stop, 7 p.m. Sept. 20, Musikfest Cafe, ArtsQuest Center, SteelStacks, Bethlehem.

Opening the concert is Jon Muq, a Uganda singer-songwriter based in Austin, Texas, who released his debut album May 31.

“It just felt like a full-circle moment,” Gilfillian says in a phone interview from on the road in Tennessee, where he’s headed to North Carolina to kick off the “Time Will Tell” tour.

He says “Black Hole Rainbow” began in 2016 or 2017, “when I was learning, getting into country music, and I wanted to add a little ‘Let’s take some spices out of that cabinet and put it in the soul dish.’

“And to me, this [new] album feels like soul with a sprinkle of some masters, you know, and that’s what I wanted. That’s what I wanted to combine for this album.”

Gilfillian certainly has a soul-infused background. When he was growing up in Milton and attending Springfield High School, his father, Nelson, was a singer and percussionist in a band that played throughout the area.

In high school, Gilfillian already was playing in a band, and when he moved on to West Chester University, he performed around the area, including at Más Mexicali Cantina.

“That was where I was getting my first gigs, playing some open mics,” he says. “And then eventually they gave me an hour set, actually two hours. Like, ‘Can you fill up two hours?’ I was like, ‘Yeah!’”

Despite graduating with a degree in psychology, Gilfillian says he knew music was his future, and he joined the government community-centered aid program AmeriCorps with hopes of landing in a music town.

“I was in a band with my friends, and they were kind of half-in, half-out, and I was like, ‘Man, where do I go to make music happen?’” he says.

“And my friends did AmeriCorps, and you know, you can go anywhere you want to go and show the people to AmeriCorps. I’m like, ‘All right.’ So I signed up and applied to Boston, New Orleans and Nashville, and got accepted to the program in Nashville.

“And behind that, I mean, that was truly the beginning.”

He moved to Nashville in 2013 and in 2016 self-released a self-titled debut EP of gospel-inspired blues-rock. He was constantly absorbing what Nashville offered.

“Nashville’s, to me, is the best musical incubator in this country,” he says. “Like, you really learn how to write songs in Nashville. In L.A., you learn how to be a flashy performer. In New York, you learn how to be cool. And then in Nashville, you learn how to write a song.”

Conversely, he said the city also welcomed his Philly soul.

“Nashville’s definitely a transplant city, so every now and then I bump into Pennsylvania folks,” he says.

“I don’t know if I met any Delco people specifically. But it feels, like, as far as the music scene, people are hungry. Everyone’s hungry. And I felt very, very welcome.

“I felt, like, ‘Yes, give me that soul, man.’ So there’s definitely a market.”

For “Black Hole Rainbow,” label Capitol Records gave him the ability to explore those influences, he says.

“And I loved, like, every moment we got to spend,” he says.

“I got to spend almost a year making that album. I was in L.A. for at least a collective six months, making that album. Just thank God for Capitol Records, I was allowed to do that.

“For that album, it was so involved and so fun the way that we did it. It was so, so different.

“We really built everything from the ground up. We layered things, then we tracked drums, then we tracked bass, then we tracked this, then we did vocals last, and it was very, very much built.

“And I wanted to have a combination of those techniques, those styles of recording. Like, I wanted to record the team because I wanted to begin making the sound of the band playing together into recording, and that was important to me.

“But I also wanted to add, I wanted to push it and take it to more modern, push it into the future a little bit and be able to record some other things on top, plus the vocals. I got to do that. It was crazy.”

After that, Gifillian embraced his soul roots by releasing a song-for-song cover album of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 soul classic “What’s Going On” in 2020, then his sophomore album, “Love Your Anyway” in 2023, which also had two Top 25 AAA chart songs.

For the new disc, he says, he sought to merge the Philly soul he loved with the country music that stole his heart upon moving to Nashville.

“The Philly soul is gonna be there,” he says. “I love that. … The soul is in the vocals for me; that to me it feels like that classic kind of soul.”

He says he didn’t fall in love with country music until he moved to Nashville and first heard progressive country music singer Sturgill Simpson.

“My manager, he was, like, ‘Yo, check this out,’” and gave him Simpson’s acclaimed 2014 album “Metabolic Sounds in Country Music,” Gilfillian says.

And I was, like, ‘Who’s this?’ And my mind was like, ‘What?’ It was blown. It was like, ‘What in the world is this?”

Gilfillian says it made him want to work with that disc’s producer, Dave Cobb, who’s been nominated for 13 Grammys, and in his studio.

Gilfillian says “Time Will Tell” is “a snapshot of my life. It’s a snapshot of my diary for the past three years,” including “working through a relationship that just wasn’t serving to me or the other person,” and dealing with his father having a heart attack.

“It changed my whole perspective on life, and I was, like, ‘What am I doing?’” he says. “There is, there’s no time to waste here, and I have to live with intention and hold the people that I love the most as high as I can, as long as I have them.

“Most of all, really realizing how precious the time is that we get on this earth. And really, really writing from a place of that gratitude. Even though my relationship didn’t work, that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t so much love there, and it doesn’t mean I wasn’t grateful for everything for that, because it really did teach me so much.

“And that’s being in the element. I wanted to capture it. I wanted it to feel raw. I wanted to feel, I wanted you to hear, the chemistry of the band in the studio. And that was important to me.”

Staying connected to the area also is important, Gifillian says.

Two days before playing Musikfest Cafe, he’ll play Philadelphia radio station WHYY’s “Xponential Festival” at Camden, New Jersey’s Freedom Mortgage Pavilion, where one of his favorite bands, The Budos Band, whom he met during one of his previous Xponential shows, will headline.

“I’m so excited,” he says. “I can’t wait to get there and get up to Bethlehem. It’s going to be great.”

Devon Gilfillian, Jon Muq, 7 p.m. Sept. 20, Musikfest Cafe, ArtsQuest Center, SteelStacks, Bethlehem. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. Tickets: https://www.artsquest.org/event/devon-gilfillian-time-will-tell-tour/