Sheffer Stephens

Sheffer Stephens is a Nashville songwriter whose new EP, return / repeat, is about the things we keep circling back to when everything else falls away: love, presence, instinct and the pull toward something larger than ourselves. Out October 13 on Stunning Models on Display, it was produced by Kieran Kelly (Sufjan Stevens, Angus & Julia Stone) at The Buddy Project in New York, more than two decades after the two made their first record together. Three songs are Stephens’s own, and two are re-workings of Mason Jennings and Chris Whitley. It moves between roots-forward rock & roll, droning psychedelic textures and quiet acoustic songs. Stephens played his first concert at four, in a conservatory, which in hindsight set expectations unreasonably high. He grew up in Louisville, the son of a choir director and a Southern gospel soprano, and got his real education from a rummage-sale Silvertone. Later, a coin toss sent him to New York with a few hundred dollars and an old white button in his pocket. (The button got a song.) He joined the band Spinoza on bass and toured in a wood-paneled, shag-carpeted camper known as the Fuzzy Nugget, all the way to a Chicago festival where they “opened” for MC Hammer. The band moved to Boston, made a record and broke up. Everyone left. He stayed, in a house above Marblehead harbor, busking the Orange Line and playing clubs, as one does. He lives in Nashville now. 100% made by humans, for humans. www.ShefferStephens.com