James Hunter

Over the span of 30 years, James Hunter has worked on the railway, busked in the streets of London, provided backup vocals and guitar for Van Morrison, played clubs and theaters all over the world, written scores of original songs, and recorded some of the most original and honest rhythm & soul albums of the last two decades.

Love You Anyway, the new album from Devon Gilfillian, is an intoxicating, genre-blasting game changer spanning soul, hip-hop, R&B, and rock, all under the banner of Black joy. With an incisive eye and unassuming swagger, Gilfillian re-imagines modern soul music by redefining its possibilities.

Produced by Jeremy Lutito (Joy Oladokun, NEEDTOBREATHE), Love You Anyway, (Fantasy) confronts as well as comforts. Chronicling Gilfillian’s journey as a Black artist living in America, it’s as much about fighting for what you believe in: equity and representation, as it is about love – finding it, making it, and channeling it into every facet of our lives. 

A captivating, can’t-miss live performer, the Philadelphia-born, Nashville based singer-songwriter regularly commands club, theater, and festival stages around the world. Now, on Love You Anyway, Gilfillian conjures the raw, sexy emotions of his predecessors and the next-level grooves of his contemporaries, taking soul music into an exciting and restorative new future. 

Bettye LaVette moved from Muskegon to Detroit when she was six, and she’s one of the Motor City’s unsung musical treasures—the queen of old-school Detroit R&B. She’s been compared with Aretha Franklin, but she says her inspiration came mostly from the blues and R&B rather than from gospel. Her early records like “You’re a Man of Words—I’m a Woman of Action,” are soul classics that are just now being rediscovered. In recent years Bettye has been better than ever, winning the W.C. Handy Comeback Album of the Year award for her emotionally torrid “A Woman Like Me,” and she has become a major creative force in her seventh decade, reinterpreting music from various genres in her own style of classic soul. Bettye’s 60-plus-year career rolls on with a new album, “LaVette.”