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Los Angeles Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
How Jensen McRae became L.A.'s next great songwriter
Jensen McRae is still chewing over something her therapist told her during their first session together. 'I was talking about how sensitive I am and how I was feeling all these feelings,' the 27-year-old singer and songwriter recalls, 'and she was like, 'You have yet to describe a feeling to me — everything you've described is a thought.'' McRae's eyes widen behind her stylish glasses. 'That destroyed me. She said, 'Feelings are in your body. Thoughts are in your head.' 'This was like six years ago, and I think about it constantly.' A proudly bookish Los Angeles native whose academic ambitions took her to the competitive Harvard-Westlake School, McRae wrote her first song at around age 8; by the time she was a teenager, music had become her way to cope with the cruelty of the world. Yet when she looks back at the stuff she wrote when she was younger, what strikes her isn't that it was too raw — it's that it wasn't raw enough. 'I think I was trying to intellectualize my feelings to get away from being vulnerable,' she says. 'Now I know there's room for both — there's a way to be intellectually rigorous about my sensitivity.' Indeed there is, as McRae demonstrates on her knockout of a sophomore album, 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!' Released in April by the respected indie label Dead Oceans (whose other acts include Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers), the LP documents the dissolution of two romantic relationships in gleaming acoustic pop songs that use gut-punch emotional detail to ponder complicated ideas of gender, privilege and abuse. In 'Massachusetts,' a snippet of which blew up when she posted it on TikTok in 2023, she captures the private universe she shared with an ex, while 'Let Me Be Wrong' thrums with an overachiever's desperation: 'Something twisted in my chest says I'm good but not the best,' she sings, the rhyme so neat that you can almost see her awaiting the listener's approving nod. 'I Can Change Him' is an unsparing account of the narrator's savior complex that McRae was tempted to leave off the album until her team convinced her otherwise. 'I think of myself as an evolved and self-actualized woman,' she says with a laugh. 'So the admission that I thought it would be my love that transforms this person — I mean, it's super embarrassing.' Then there's 'Savannah,' which lays out the lasting damage left behind after a breakup, and the chilling 'Daffodils,' in which McRae sings about a guy who 'steals base while I sleep.' McRae's songs don't flinch from trauma, but they can also be very funny. 'I'd like to blame the drugs,' she sings, longing for toxic old comforts in a song called 'I Don't Do Drugs.' And here's how she brings the guy in 'I Can Change Him' to life in just a few lines: Same old eight-dollar cologneSame old he can't be aloneSame old cigarettes he rollsSame old Cozmo's 'Plastic Soul' Asked whether she'd rather make someone laugh or cry, McRae needs no time to think. 'I'm always proud when I make someone cry,' she says as she sits on a park bench in Silver Lake on a recent afternoon. 'But more important to me than being the sad girl is that I'm funny — that's way more important to my identity.' She smiles. 'I've definitely made dark jokes where people are like, 'That's horrible that you think you can joke about that,'' she says. 'I'm like, 'It's my thing — the sad thing happened to me.'' McRae's music has attracted some famous fans. In 2024 she opened for Noah Kahan on tour, and she recently jammed with Justin Bieber at his place after the former teen idol reached out on Instagram with kind words about 'Massachusetts.' Last month, McRae — a graduate of USC's Thornton School of Music — played a pair of packed hometown shows at the El Rey where she introduced 'Savannah' by telling the crowd, 'You are not defined by the worst thing that ever happened to you.' 'Jensen is extremely … if I say the word 'gifted,' you'll be like, 'okay' — but she truly is a gifted individual,' says Patrice Rushen, the veteran jazz and R&B musician who mentored McRae as chair of the Thornton School's popular music program. (Among the classics McRae learned to perform during her studies was Rushen's 1982 'Forget Me Nots.') Rushen praises the depth and precision of McRae's songwriting — 'her ability to see beyond what's right in front of her and to find just the right word or texture in her storytelling.' 'I adored her as a student,' Rushen adds. McRae was born in Santa Monica and grew up in Woodland Hills in a tight-knit family; her dad is Black and her mom is Jewish, and she has two brothers — the older of whom is her business manager, the younger of whom plays keyboard in her road band. The singer describes herself as both a goody two-shoes and a teacher's pet, which she affectionately blames on her father, a lawyer who went to UCLA and Harvard Law School. 'He was born in 1965 — his birth certificate says 'Negro' on it, which is crazy,' she says. 'His whole life, it was: 'You have to be twice as good to get half as far.' And even though I was born in the '90s, that was still kind of instilled in us. 'Especially being at Harvard-Westlake,' she adds. 'I was one of the few Black kids, and I didn't want to be underestimated. Now, I find being underestimated kind of funny because I have so much confidence in my own ability that when someone thinks I'm not gifted in whatever way, I'm like, 'Oh, you'll find out you're wrong soon enough.'' Having absorbed the songwriting fundamentals of James Taylor, Sara Bareilles and Taylor Swift, McRae entered USC in 2015 and played her first gig — 'the first one that wasn't a school talent show,' she clarifies — at L.A.'s Hotel Cafe after her freshman year. 'I don't know if my mom knows this, but I told her not to come,' she recalls with a laugh. 'I was like, 'I'm 18 — I'm grown up now — and I'm gonna be hanging with all these cool people.'' In fact, her audience that night consisted of only the bartender and the other acts on the bill. Her creative breakthrough came when she wrote her song 'White Boy' when she was 20. It's about feeling invisible, and McRae knew she'd achieved something because 'when I finished it, I was like, 'I can never play this in front of anyone.'' A few years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she fired off a jokey tweet imagining that Bridgers would soon write a song about 'hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at dodger stadium'; the post went viral, racking up shares from thousands of people, including Bridgers. 'I had to put my phone in a drawer because it was buzzing so much,' says McRae, who ended up writing the song herself and calling it 'Immune.' For 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!' — the title borrows a line of dialogue from 'Back to the Future' — McRae sought a lusher sound than she got on her folky 2022 debut; she recorded the album in North Carolina with the producer Brad Cook, who's also worked with Bon Iver and Waxahatchee and who helped fill out the songs with appealing traces of turn-of-the-millennium pop by Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson. As a singer, McRae can expertly control the sob in her voice, as in 'Tuesday,' a stark piano ballad about a betrayal made all the more painful by how little it meant to the traitor. At the El Rey, McRae doubled down on that theme in a florid yet intimate rendition of 'I Can't Make You Love Me,' the Mike Reid/Allen Shamblin tune that Bonnie Raitt turned into one of pop's greatest anthems of dejection. What did McRae learn about songwriting at USC? She mentions a technique called 'toggling,' which one professor illustrated using John Mayer's 'Why Georgia.' 'The first line is, 'I'm driving up '85 in the kind of morning that lasts all afternoon,'' McRae says. 'That's a description of the outside world. Then the next line is, 'I'm just stuck inside the gloom,' toggling back to the internal emotion. That's something I pay attention to now. If I'm writing a verse, I'll do scene-setting, scene-setting, scene-setting, then how do I feel about it?' McRae is particularly good at dropping the listener into a scenario, as in 'Savannah,' which starts: 'There is an intersection in your college town with your name on it.' To get to that kind of intriguing specificity, she'll sometimes write six or eight lines of a verse, to discard the first few — 'Those are often just filler words,' she says — and 'rearrange the rest so that whatever I had at the end goes at the top. Now I have to beat that.' For all her craft, McRae knows that songwriting is just one of the skills required of any aspiring pop star. She loves performing on the road, though touring has become 'physically punishing,' as she puts it, since she was diagnosed a few years ago with a thyroid condition and chronic hives, both of which have led to a severely restricted diet. She recently posted a TikTok in which she detailed her regimen of medications — one attempt, she says, to bring some visibility to the topic of chronic illness. (That said, McRae admits to being unsettled by the DM she received the other day from a fan who recognized her at her allergist's office: 'They're like, 'Hey, I saw you — I was going in to get my shots too.'') McRae views social media more broadly as 'a factory that I clock into and clock out of.' She's well aware that it's what enabled her to start building an audience. And she's hardly anti-phone. 'I love being on my phone,' she says. 'I literally was born in the right generation. But when it comes to constantly looking at images of myself, that's my business card or my portfolio — it's not actually me, the human being.' In January, she deleted TikTok during the brief outage related to President Trump's ban of the app. 'Then, of course, it came back right away, but I couldn't re-download it. So for a month I didn't have TikTok. As it turns out, I was fine.' Arguably better? 'Probably, yeah. I'm back on it now, obviously, because I have to do promo. At first I thought it was the loudest, most overstimulating thing in the world — I couldn't believe I used it. Then after a week, I was like, oh yeah, no, I'm reacclimated.'
Scoop
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
Jensen McRae Releases Sophomore Album
Folk's modern muse, Jensen McRae, has released her sophomore album, I Don't Know How But They Found Me! via Dead Oceans. Throughout the project, McRae explores the emotional aftershocks of intimacy and the deeper process of reclaiming the self. Her voice — airy, textured, and undeniably expressive — embodies both the heartbreak of being left and the strength it takes to leave. The album title, drawn from her favourite film Back to the Future, captures that resilience: 'I could've easily collapsed beneath the weight of what happened to me, but I didn't. I was bulletproof the whole time.' The album holds space for pain and power in equal measure, tracing each feeling with unflinching honesty. I Don't Know How But They Found Me! was recorded in North Carolina with Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver), featuring contributions from Nathan Stocker (Hippo Campus), Matthew McCaughan (Bon Iver) and her brother Holden McRae. The album opens with 'The Rearranger', a track that shimmers with a nostalgic gleam, even as it suggests trouble in paradise. Another stand-out track, 'Let Me Be Wrong', is about giving oneself permission to knowingly do the wrong thing because sometimes the only way to learn is through mistakes. The project marks McRae's transformation into self-assuredness, looking back at heartbreak from a new, more sure-footed and powerful vantage point. In addition to the story of healing after heartbreak, I Don't Know How But They Found Me! reaffirms McRae's defiance of expectations as she deepens her singer-songwriter identity and claims space for young Black women in the genre. Advertisement - scroll to continue reading McRae shares, "More than anything, I am grateful to have made this album as a record of my transition into real womanhood. It's me processing girlhood, with all its attendant naïveté and guilelessness and resistance to change, and emerging as an adult who is capable of forgiveness and transformation and measured optimism." Accompanying the recent singles 'Savannah', 'Praying For Your Downfall', and viral hit 'Massachusetts', the eleven-track album marks an evolution for McRae, blending poignant lyrics with familiar pop melodies. 'Savannah' is a hauntingly beautiful anthem of liberation and self-discovery that finds McRae reflecting on leaving a toxic relationship, only to be confronted by her past at every turn. Partnered with the dreamy music video directed by Rena Johnson, 'Savannah' has earned praise from Rolling Stone, ELLE, Consequence, FLOOD and BET. The penultimate track 'Praying For Your Downfall' oozes snark and charm, cutting down a lover who's no longer worth the ill will she once wished. The beloved 'Massachusetts' shines longer than the viral snippet we first heard as an authentic and cohesive closing track. At just 27, Jensen McRae has already toured with Noah Kahan, MUNA, Amos Lee, and Corinne Bailey Rae, graced a Times Square billboard, and served as the cover of Spotify's Today's Singer-Songwriters playlist. Recently named Deezer's Global Artist to Watch for April, Jensen continues to build momentum as a fearless storyteller, weaving raw vulnerability and poetic lyricism into songs that explore love, loss, and the complexities of life. A graduate of USC's Thornton School of Music and a GRAMMY Camp alum, McRae is carving out space for young Black women in the folk genre with unflinching honesty and raw lyricism. Recent single 'Savannah' has earned widespread acclaim from McRae released her debut album, Are You Happy Now?, in 2022, featuring viral singles like 'Immune' and 'Wolves', and has earned widespread acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vulture, UPROXX, Billboard, and Stereogum. She's been spotlighted in PAPER, DORK, and Wonderland Magazine, with the latter declaring, 'The future is just beginning for Jensen McRae'. A recent feature in The New York Times reflected on the songs of I Don't Know How But They Found Me! as working through 'tangled emotions and phases: hope, disillusion, ambivalence, deceptions, negotiations, ruptures and stubborn memories.' This week, Jensen made her late night TV debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Performing album tentpole and viral hit ''Massachusetts' - WATCH HERE: Inspired by the likes of Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman, McRae's voice—both literal and lyrical—resonates deeply, personifying the human experience with rare vulnerability and grace. With a sound that blends introspection and artistry, she's a lifetime artist here to stay.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Jensen McRae and 10 More Artists to Watch
Every week, our critics spotlight notable new songs on the Playlist. Here's more about 11 artists behind them, selected by the pop music critics Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz; a culture reporter, Joe Coscarelli; and Caryn Ganz, the pop music editor for The New York Times. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.) Jensen McRae Jensen McRae writes constantly: journals, poems, fiction, screenplays and, most publicly, songs. 'I've always wanted to do a million things with regard to writing and telling stories,' she said. 'But music was always the first choice.' Born in Santa Monica, Calif., and still based in Los Angeles, McRae, 27, joins a long history of California folk-pop songwriters — the legacy of the Laurel Canyon era — who draw on the diaristic specifics of their lives for songs that listeners take to heart. Her second album, 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!,' is due April 25, with a tour that starts in May. As a child, 'I was usually one of the only Black kids in a class,' McRae recalled in a video interview. 'When you're put into the observer, outsider position early on, it makes it pretty easy to figure out who you really are and what you really want, because conformity isn't a choice. I started to develop this identity of being a narrator and a collector of details about my life, about other people's lives.' McRae has old-school inclinations. Her music relies on hand-played, organic instruments and the power of her unadorned voice. Her 2022 debut album, 'Are You Happy Now?,' included stark songs like 'Wolves,' about sexual predators, accompanied only by her guitar. But as a 21st-century performer, McRae maintains a robust social-media presence, sharing songs in progress and hosting an interview podcast, 'What Were You Thinking?' Her career has thrived on viral moments. At the height of the Covid pandemic in 2021, she posted a joking tweet predicting that Phoebe Bridgers would write a song about 'hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at dodger stadium' — and then wrote the song herself, a Bridgers homage titled 'Immune.' An early version of 'Massachusetts,' the song about an ex-boyfriend that concludes her new album, reached millions of views. When McRae toured arenas opening for Noah Kahan, audiences were singing along and raising lighted cellphones before it was officially released as a single. 'That made me cry,' she said. The songs on her new album delve into 'two relationships that I had in quick succession,' she said; the romances failed. The songs work through tangled emotions and phases: hope, disillusion, ambivalence, deceptions, negotiations, ruptures and stubborn memories. 'I want to give purpose to my pain,' she said. 'Being able to turn it into art that other people can relate to, without having any knowledge of me and my relationships — that is the dream.' Her songwriting, finished in 2023, was followed by sessions with multiple producers. Now, with more than a year of distance, McRae has decided that her exes 'were doing their best,' she said. 'If you have a lot of stuff that you haven't worked out within yourself, and then you start interacting with other people, your best is sometimes going to wreak some havoc on your relationships. We're all humans. This is all of our first time on Earth. It's not necessarily that I forgive everything that happened. But I have a lot greater understanding.' JON PARELES You'll Also Be Hearing More From: 1900Rugrat A South Florida rapper with a deeply scraped-up voice, extravagantly slurred syllables and a hardscrabble wit. 1900Rugrat broke out last year with a handful of cheeky freestyles that went viral for their sometimes preposterous punchlines, and his rigid seriousness while delivering them. SOUNDS LIKE A friskier, funnier take on the raw, roundabout flows of a fellow Floridian, Kodak Black; also full of unpredictable rhyme choices à la Lil Wayne. WHAT'S HAPPENING His biggest hit last year was 'One Take Freestyle,' on which he raps about a drug cornucopia and his whiteness over weepy, sleepy horns. On the back of that song's success, he secured a collaboration with Kodak Black for a remix that appears on 1900Rugrat's boisterous and testy new mixtape, 'Porch 2 the Pent,' which also features collaborations with Lil Yachty and BossMan Dlow, simpatico rappers equally fluent in boasting and roasting. JON CARAMANICA High Vis A London band skilled at making music about struggle that doesn't sound like one. Over three albums released since 2019, the five-piece has written about class consciousness (its name is a reference to 'the unifying clothing item of the working class,' the frontman Graham Sayle told the NME of the neon safety gear) and personal battles ('What is truth when your mind's a lie?' he spits on the band's most recent LP). SOUNDS LIKE Hooky hardcore with chugging riffs and gleaming post-punk flourishes. (Listen for touches of the '90s English alt-rock band Ned's Atomic Dustbin.) The band's third album, 'Guided Tour,' arrived in October stocked with Sayle's shouty vocals, reverb-heavy guitars and lyrics that teeter between hope and despair. WHAT'S HAPPENING A U.S. tour kicks off on April 15 in Seattle and wraps a month later in Los Angeles. The band will hit the European festival circuit starting in June. CARYN GANZ Horsegirl Reverent but slyly inventive students of indie-rock history, the Chicago trio first gained recognition in 2022 for its shoegaze-y debut LP, 'Versions of Modern Performance,' released when its members — Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein and Gigi Reece — were still teenagers. On their springy, confidently minimalist sophomore album, 'Phonetics On and On,' they've moved to New York for college and, it seems, added some new influences to their dorm-room record collections. SOUNDS LIKE A Gen Z take on the bare-bones, deadpan post-punk of the Raincoats, or a carefully curated K Records playlist set to shuffle. Recent tracks like '2468' and 'Switch Over' are as catchy as playground chants, but a closer listen to their construction reveals compositional complexity and clever wordplay. WHAT'S HAPPENING Horsegirl follows the February release of 'Phonetics On and On,' which was produced by the experimental singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, with a short American tour in late March and a more extensive one later this summer. LINDSAY ZOLADZ J Noa For sheer syllables per second, few rappers in any language can match the speed of J Noa from the Dominican Republic, a songwriter who seized attention with intricate, breakneck freestyles in Spanish. J Noa — Nohelys Jiménez — is 19 and has already released an EP and two full-length albums. SOUNDS LIKE Crisp, hard-nosed, fast and then — often — double-speed rhymes about growing up amid violence and addiction, honing survival skills and flexing her ambitions. And, every so often, a tuneful chorus. WHAT'S HAPPENING Her third album is likely to arrive in May, and assorted collaborations are in the works. PARELES Model/Actriz It's hard to resist the charms of Cole Haden, the frontman of the Brooklyn (by way of Boston) quartet Model/Actriz. Tall, lithe and chatty, he stalks the stage and bounces on monitors in hulking heels, then takes the show into the crowd, singing into faces and giving listeners an extreme close-up as he works the room. SOUNDS LIKE A very noisy band dragging gothy post-punk songs across the dance floor. Nine Inch Nails is a clear touchstone on the group's debut from 2023, 'Dogsbody,' nearly 38 minutes of arty peels of guitar, precision drumming, unrelenting bass lines and Haden's incantations. In Model/Actriz's latest single, 'Cinderella,' Haden reveals his decision not to have a birthday party with a princess theme when he was 5, leaving him 'quiet, alone and devastated.' WHAT'S HAPPENING The band's second album, 'Pirouette,' is due May 2, immediately followed by tour dates in the United States and Europe. GANZ Momma A band faithfully recreating '90s alternative rock's (mostly) un-self-conscious side. The band's founding singer-songwriters, Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, met during high school outside Los Angeles — 'Bottle blonde, you're a god,' goes one new lyric — and have dialed in their spin on throwback Gen-X-ness across three albums and a pile of singles since 2018, including their 2022 breakout 'Household Name.' SOUNDS LIKE Diligent students of artful distortion and dreamy melodies, mixing some Smashing Pumpkins, Pixies and Liz Phair with 'TRL'-ready Michelle Branch and Best Coast choruses. Now based in Brooklyn, the four-piece — which also includes the producer and bassist Aron Kobayashi Ritch and the drummer Preston Fulks — recorded its new album in both coastal cities, despite the shout-out to the Midwest on the new song 'Ohio All the Time': 'I never got Ohio, babe, but now I do.' WHAT'S HAPPENING Ahead of the band's new album, 'Welcome to My Blue Sky,' out April 4, the band's Pumpkins-esque single, 'I Want You (Fever),' is finding an audience on alternative radio. Momma will spend the spring on a headlining tour, ending at home in Brooklyn on May 31. JOE COSCARELLI Oklou The French songwriter, singer and producer Marylou Mayniel has been releasing music for a decade, singing in English and floating her gentle voice amid otherworldly electronics. Her debut album, 'Choke Enough,' came out in February. SOUNDS LIKE Oklou coos thoughts about information, disaster, personal connection and blissful sensation on 'Choke Enough.' Her latest collaborators include hyperpop experts like A.G. Cook and Danny L Harle, but her own music isn't glitchy or brittle. The tracks twinkle behind her voice like starry skies. WHAT'S HAPPENING She tours Canada and the United States in October, with performances in Europe in April and November. PARELES OsamaSon SoundCloud rap is now in its fifth or sixth wave, and has transformed from a relatively unified mayhem-first approach to hip-hop into the chaos that ensues when that method becomes exponentially looser and decentered. Last year, it took form in the rise of rappers like OsamaSon and Nettspend, rage-rap rookies whose rhymes come out in digitized bleats that sound as if beamed in from a particularly tumultuous corner of space. SOUNDS LIKE What happens when you listen to unreleased Playboi Carti snippets for several months straight without interruption. The new OsamaSon songs run about two minutes on average and feel as if they're playing on 1.5x speed — full of coughed-up flirtations and threats that race past in a blur of astral sprinkles. WHAT'S HAPPENING The latest OsamaSon LP, 'Jump Out,' came out in February. CARAMANICA Mei Semones A Japanese American songwriter and guitarist who now lives in Brooklyn, Mei Semones studied at the Berklee College of Music, where she assembled her band and honed her virtuosic, culture-hopping music. SOUNDS LIKE A breezy, utterly idiosyncratic mixture of jazz guitar, bossa nova lilt, chamber-pop string arrangements, indie-rock crunch and lyrics that switch between English and Japanese, living up to one of her song titles: 'I Can Do What I Want.' WHAT'S HAPPENING Her full-length debut album, 'Animaru' ('Animal' in Japanese) arrives May 2, followed by a U.S. tour. PARELES skaiwater Skaiwater, 24, is a producer, songwriter and melodic rapper from Nottingham, England, now based in Los Angeles, who brings professional-grade hooks to the wilds of SoundCloud. SOUNDS LIKE A post-Playboi Carti bridge between Lil Uzi Vert's emo-tinged trap music and Lil Nas X's most forward-thinking pop ambitions. (Fittingly, both Uzi and Lil Nas have been collaborators.) While skaiwater's most anarchic internet peers have a tossed-off quality to their genre experiments, skaiwater has an old-school producer's deliberateness, mixing hyperpop maximalism — blown-out bass, laissez-faire attitudes toward widespread sampling — with reverent nods to R&B and Black dance music niches, from London to Philadelphia to Chicago. WHAT'S HAPPENING After releasing their second studio album, '#Mia' (for 'Manic in America'), on Valentine's Day, and appearing at the Los Angeles edition of the rap festival Rolling Loud earlier this month, skaiwater, who is nonbinary, is keeping their next moves typically quiet. COSCARELLI
