“I asked them what the secret to a long and happy marriage was,” Linda Draper says, recalling a post-gig conversation with a pair of married fans.

“Jack is very patient,” Ivana, a flight attendant who works long hours, explained. “And Linda,” she continued, “I always carry a tube of lipstick in my purse. No matter how late it is, as soon as I turn the corner towards home, I reapply!”

Patience and Lipstick (Jan. 21st, 2022, South Forty Records) is now the fortuitous title of Draper’s upcoming new album, and the tunes on the currently Brooklyn, soon to be North Carolina-based artist’s latest feel like they came about just as naturally.

“So the secret to a long and happy marriage is patience and lipstick?!,” Draper thought. “You know, I think there’s a song in there somewhere.”

Patience and lipstick.

The phrase also encompasses another idea: Of being willing to wait for things to get better and being ready to shine when they do. For Draper, the road to this record has been long, and not just because she has paid so many dues on the NYC songwriter scene, starting with her debut album Ricochet twenty years ago.

While Patience and Lipstick leans more country than any previous Draper album, anyone who may try to push her into the gentile, soon-to-be-North Carolinian corner, needs to know that the vulnerability in Draper’s songs is matched with the strength and attitude of a New Yorker.

Draper faced down and blew away many an audience at the Lower East Side’s songwriter testing ground Sidewalk Cafe (RIP) in the early years, and her first four albums were produced by noted iconoclast, Kramer (currently seeing his own resurgence with the re-boot of his groundbreaking record label Shimmy Disc.)

Talk is cheap still they keep speaking in their crooked tongues

Trying to sell me the idea we’re all in this together

I beg to differ... I beg to differ

We were never all in this together

There is no tether nor was there ever

The lyrics are from “Tether,” the first single from Patience and Lipstick, a perfect example of Draper’s special way of twisting a dark tune, tinged with the appropriate cynicism, into a sing-along.


Draper wrote the song just as the pandemic was shutting down the city.

“I was amazed and disgusted with how, literally overnight, every TV commercial, news outlet, and talk show was suddenly barraging us with these insincere and overly sentimental messages about how we are all in this together,” she says. “If there is anything that maybe everyone can all agree on these days, it is that we are not all in this together.”

It is a message of passion, blunt truth, and Draper’s personal reality, and it calls for patience. And it’s the album’s follow-up single “‘81 Camaro” that has gotta be the lipstick.

“My dream is for the folks at Cowboys (described online as “Orlando’s Best Country Nightclub”) to make up a country line dance for this song that I can actually learn how to dance to with them,” Draper exclaims.

The tune truly has the potential to become a standard in that way, which makes Draper’s other dream of having Lucinda Williams cover it, seem plausible.

Patience and lipstick.


Draper also identified with this in her decision to cover the 1972 Barbara Keith song “Detroit or Buffalo,” another of the album’s many highlights.

“As soon as Jeff Eyrich (Draper’s current producer, and himself a country music authority, having toured as bassist with all-time great, Tanya Tucker) shared this song with me, I instantly knew I wanted to cover it,” Draper remembers. “Barbara’s voice, and the message in her lyrics, are timeless, raw, and fearlessly vulnerable.”

On the fearless tip, Draper is also embarking on another new journey (a metaphorical one, not her upcoming relocation.)

“The name is inspired by the area in Montana next to where my mother’s side of the family has had their ranch since the 1930s,” she explains of South Forty Records, her newly formed label. “With the label, I’ve decided to provide a musical homestead, by honoring the music for the generations that came before and preserving it for the generations that will follow.”

It’s an endeavor inspired by her family’s near-century long relationship to the land, delivered with an acknowledgement that the effort may only bear its greatest fruit in the distant future. However, when it does, there is little doubt that Draper’s talents will impress.

Patience and lipstick.

Patience and Lipstick, the latest album by Linda Draper, is scheduled for release on Jan. 21st, 2022 preceded by the singles “Tether” (Oct. 8th), “‘81 Camaro” (Nov. 5th), and “All In Due Time” (Jan. 7th).