Devin Shaffer – Patience
Today, Brooklyn-via-Chicago singer-songwriter Devin Shaffer releases her second album and studio debut Patience via American Dreams.
The release arrives alongside a new music video for the album’s closing track “Stranger,” filmed at Fort Tilden Beach right after the sun set.
On the making of the video, Shaffer shares: “There was a hurricane farther off the coast and the waves were really imposing, like little mountain ranges. I knew I wanted to make a video like this for Stranger—in New York but also somehow separate, performing alone at the edge of the world.”
Written between 2021 and 2023 and Shaffer’s move from Chicago to New York City, Patience mirrors life’s highs and lows on the search for deeper meaning, purpose, and connection. The album includes the previously released singles “Anyone,” described by GoldFlakePaint as “shadowy and dream-like”; “I Guess I’m Crawling,” a hushed track that distills the record’s spirit; and the lead single, “All My Dreams Are Coming True,” which earned effusive praise from NPR Music for Shaffer’s “beautiful” voice and “heart-wrenching” lyrics.
Patience takes on the hushed intimacy of songwriters like Vashti Bunyan, Sibylle Baier, and Linda Perhacs and updates it for the twenty-first century. After releasing her debut LP, In My Dreams I’m There in 2021, Shaffer found a discarded Martin acoustic guitar 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 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.
To celebrate the release, Devin Shaffer will perform a special album release show in New York City on Friday, December 5 at The Hancock. The evening will mark Shaffer’s first-ever live performance with a full band, and will include opening sets from Alice Does Computer Music and Cassandra Croft.
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