Devin Shaffer – Patience
Today, Devin Shaffer announces her studio debut and second full-length album, Patience, arriving November 7 via American Dreams.
Written between 2021 and 2023, during Shaffer’s relocation from Chicago to New York City, Patience mirrors life’s highs and lows on the search for deeper meaning, purpose, and connection. Across this stirring collection of songs, Shaffer enlists support from attuned instrumentalists: Lucy Liyou on piano, Sarah Galdes (L’Rain, Bartees Strange) on drums, Marilu Donovan (LEYA) on harp, and Mari Rubio (More Eaze) on pedal steel. Here, she challenges both herself and the listener to find peace in the unknowing. “I keep thinking about this idea that once you think you’re on the path, you’ve lost the path,” Shaffer shares. “There is no certainty, there is no knowing. It’s all about surrender.”
To introduce the album alongside the announcement, Shaffer is sharing lead single “All My Dreams Are Coming True,” paired with a video filmed in New York’s Central Park in collaboration with Kim Upstill and Marilu Donovan.
The track channels the hushed intimacy of 1960’s folk-pop artists like Vashti Bunyan and Margo Guryan—updated for the twenty-first century with a sharp edge of biting sarcasm.
Reflecting on the song’s origins, Shaffer explains: “After my last record came out in 2021, I felt numb despite things going well on the surface. The lockdown had just ended, I was making positive changes in my life, things were happening that I had dreamt of for so long, and yet I couldn’t feel any of it. I watched the good things slide off of me like something slippery and I retreated into myself. I wrote ‘All My Dreams Are Coming True’ about that great void. The disconnect between what others see and the truth as it feels in my interior. Now people are talking more about burnout, and the numbness we are all experiencing as a result of the brutality and tragedy we are confronted with daily. It’s not some personality flaw, it’s not just me, it’s a generational exhaustion, a hopelessness epidemic.”
After releasing her debut album, In My Dreams I’m There, Shaffer found a discarded Martin on the side of the road with a note that read, “This is for you.” “In the past, my songs were very much woven into this greater ambient soundscape,” explains Shaffer. “Songs would emerge from ambient drift and archival audio. When I had more traditional songs, I never really let them sit on their own.” But she took the new guitar as an invitation to strip down her songwriting practice.
Shaffer began writing a series of whispered folk songs from her bed, tracked vocals and guitar with Michael Macdonald (The Slaps, Tenci, Mia Joy, Tasha) at Bim Bom Studios in Chicago, and invited her collaborators to record on them. After arranging their contributions, Shaffer brought the music to La Frette Studios in France, the esteemed 100-year-old mansion-turned-recording studio, for mixing sessions with engineer Anthony Cazade (Fontaines D.C., Ballaké Sissoko) and Jordan Reyes (ONO, The Ark of Teeth).
Patience oscillates between high and low, between certainty and uncertainty. All of these supposed failures, Shaffer suggests, lead you to where you’re supposed to be. Though her newest songs navigate optimism and pessimism, hope and defeat, frustration and acceptance, on Patience, Shaffer has never sounded so sure.
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