New York-based musician Devin Shaffer keeps on shaping her world of intimate, reflective folk music. After making her debut with In My Dreams I’m There in 2021, she’s spent the past few years refining her songwriting, moving from Chicago to New York, and building a sound that still feels vulnerable but also more assured. Along the way, she picked up a discarded Martin acoustic guitar, an almost poetic twist of fate, that inspired her to strip back her process and focus on songs in their most essential form. For her upcoming record, Shaffer leads a group of collaborators through hushed, detailed arrangements that put her guitar and voice at the center.
Her new single “I Guess I’m Crawling” captures the essence of that vision. It serves as the core of Patience, distilling the album’s spirit into one fragile yet determined song. Shaffer keeps the arrangement spare, her guitar steady and her vocals hushed, as if she were singing directly to the listener. The lyrics move through weariness and self-doubt, climbing uphill with a “broken body” and sinking into a “quicksand bed,” yet they return to something gentler. “In a way, ‘I Guess I’m Crawling’ is the ethos of the record,” she says. “It is a surrender to the pace at which things move, a surrender to all the setbacks, limitations, and diversions that have led me to where I am now.” By the final lines, she finds solace in yielding rather than pushing forward: “I guess I lay down by the pond. Joy in music all night long. I guess I’m crawling.” The accompanying video, pieced together from grainy Super 8 footage of her studio sessions in Chicago and at La Frette in France, mirrors that same quiet vulnerability. Simple moments are stitched into something enduring.
“I Guess I’m Crawling” follows the gorgeous “All My Dreams Are Coming True,” and both tracks preview Devin Shaffer’s first studio album, Patience, due out November 7, 2025. Written between 2021 and 2023, the album traces life’s uncertainties with quiet strength. An invitation to listeners to find peace in the unknowing.
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