“I keep thinking about this idea that once you think you’re on the path, you’ve lost the path,” says New York musician Devin Shaffer, explaining the ethos behind Patience, her first studio album. “There is no certainty, there is no knowing. It’s all about surrender.” 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 spiritual meaning, purpose, and connection. For the first time, Shaffer leads a group of sensitive 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—through a stirring, hushed collection of folk songs. On Patience, Shaffer challenges both herself and the listener to find peace in the unknowing and comfort in the surrender. 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 foregrounds Shaffer’s acoustic guitar and voice—tender, haunting, and controlled—using her arrangements to conjure atmosphere. The opening track, a near-silent field recording taken from the windowsill of Shaffer’s Brooklyn bedroom, fades into the first soft fingerpicked notes of her guitar on “Forever,” bridging the gap between Shaffer’s earlier work and the clarity of Patience. While Shaffer yearns for permanence in the first few lines of “Forever,” as Liyou’s twinkling piano emerges, she changes her tune, instead finding comfort, even strength, in accepting change as it comes. “All My Dreams Are Coming True” unifies biting sarcasm (“I’ve been pacing back and forth for so long I think it’s a sport”) with an upbeat, folk rock beat, before transitioning with an interlude to “Anyone”: a waltz with a Galdes shuffle, light piano flourishes from Liyou and lyrics that are gentle yet defiant (“I’m in the spring of my life, I’m in the zone again”). Patience oscillates between high and low, between certainty and uncertainty. The penultimate track, “I Guess I’m Crawling,” acts as a thesis statement. Shaffer’s guitar is right up front, her vocals gentle, like she’s singing a lullaby. But she sings of inconveniences, mistakes, shortcomings, unfairnesses, doubts herself. “Do you believe in me, fifty paces up ahead?” she asks. “Trudging up a mountain, broken body, quicksand bed.” This is where patience comes in: as she sings, “it’s the only trick I know.” By the end of the track, a deal is made: “I guess I lay down by the pond. Joy in music, all night long. I guess I’m crawling.” 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.
