Latest news with #JensenMcRae
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.'
NZ Herald
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Music: Jensen McRae, Jenny Hval and Car Seat Headrest reviewed
Growing up black and Jewish in Los Angeles, singer-songwriter Jensen McRae looked to mature writers (Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Alicia Keys) as role models as she sought to sidestep expectations she'd be just another R'n'B artist.
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.
Toronto Sun
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Sun
Jensen McRae makes authentic folk-pop internet can't resist
Published Apr 25, 2025 • 4 minute read Singer-songwriter Jensen McRae poses for a portrait on Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Los Angeles. Photo by Chris Pizzello / AP Photo Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page. NEW YORK — As the COVID-19 vaccine began distributing more widely in early 2021, California-raised singer-songwriter Jensen McRae affectionally joked in a tweet that Phoebe Bridgers would release a song in two years about 'hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at Dodger Stadium.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Bridgers didn't release the song, but McRae did. As the tweet took off, she threaded a video of herself singing 'a preemptive cover.' 'Immune,' penned by McRae in Bridgers' contemplative style, was released in full within two weeks. 'It was a perfect storm,' McRae, 27, told The Associated Press. 'I was parodying Phoebe Bridgers who was becoming world famous in that exact moment. … I was also writing about this topic that everyone was thinking about constantly because we were in lockdowns.' Bridgers reposted the video, writing simply: 'oh my god.' The song preluded McRae's debut EP, released in 2021, and album, in 2022, which led to touring gigs with Muna and Noah Kahan. Last year, she signed with Dead Oceans, the same record label that represents Bridgers. McRae's sophomore album, the folk-pop 'I Don't Know How, But They Found Me!,' is out Friday. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The title is a reference to 'Back to The Future,' her favorite movie. It's a line of dialogue said by scientist Doc Brown just before he falls in a hail of bullets, causing protagonist Marty McFly to flee back in time in Brown's rigged DeLorean. 'At the end of the movie — which, there's no spoilers, because this movie's 40 years old — you find out (Doc) was wearing a bulletproof vest the whole time. And that to me sort of is what my 20s have been like. There are all these events that are happening that feel like they should take me out, but I just keep standing up anyway,' McRae said. 'That's kind of the narrative of the album.' Resilience has long been a motif in McRae's songwriting. Her debut album, 'Are You Happy Now?', deftly tackled sexual predators and racist microaggressions with poetic meditations on identity, love, growth and beauty. On the album's most-streamed song, the ballad 'My Ego Dies in the End,' she sings, 'If I don't write about it, was it really worth it?' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. 'There's this quote that I can't cite, but someone said, as a writer, you've experienced enough by the age of 25 to have writing material for the rest of your life. I don't know if everyone agrees with that statement, but I certainly do,' McRae said. It's years of practice, and reflection, that have brought clarity to those experiences. 'I Don't Know How But They Found Me!' is composed of songs McRae wrote throughout her early 20s, in the wake of one relationship and the rise and fall of another. She finished the album last spring in North Carolina with producer Brad Cook, a collaborator of Bon Iver, Waxahatchee and Suki Waterhouse. The 10 days they spent on the record, McRae said, were 'a master class.' 'Jensen flat out blew me away on every single level,' said Cook, who met McRae for the first time when she arrived for the session. 'I got a master class from her as well, frankly. Jensen's just so organized, emotionally and spiritually, it was just really easy to go where the songs needed to go.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. A video of McRae singing the first verse of her song ' Massachusetts,' accrued millions of TikTok views in the fall of 2023, well before it was released in full in July 2024. While the internet's interest in 'Immune' two years prior was momentarily destabilizing ('There's a meme of Patrick (from 'SpongeBob') coming home to his rock, and there are all these eyes poking out and he goes, 'Who are you people?' That was what I felt like,' McRae says), its embrace of 'Massachusetts' was confusing for other reasons. McRae was in the process of making this album, and the snippet she shared felt separate from the narrative she was constructing. Despite an onslaught of comments from listeners asking for the full song, she considered leaving it unreleased or tabling it for much later. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Then she got a huge cosign. 'When Justin Bieber posted about it, I was like, well, you forced my hand,' McRae laughs. 'So then I changed course.' The solution, she realized, was that 'Massachusetts' — a song about the specific memories that don't leave you when a relationship ends — would be the conclusion to the album's story. Cook kept the song's production minimal, centering McRae's vocals and acoustic guitar. 'Every rhythm just reinforces that,' he said. 'This whole record, I would say, is a lesson in getting out of the way of the song as much as you're reinforcing it.' McRae hasn't been able to diagnose exactly why fans online are drawn to certain songs like 'Massachusetts' over others. Cook says it's the same amorphous quality that drives all good music: honesty. 'I think that the beauty of authenticity is it's just so powerful that you don't know why,' he said. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. In any case, McRae has worked to keep her brushes with internet fame from swaying her creative process. 'Every decision I'm making about this is like, 'Do I want this?' And 'Is this going to be a good move for my career?'' she said. 'Because eventually, no matter what I do, the viral moment passes.' But fans' reactions have helped her recognize what makes her deeply personal songs relatable — especially as she, too, considers the project with fresh ears and new perspective ahead of an upcoming tour. 'When you're going through something difficult, intellectually, you know you're not the first person to whom it's happened. But it feels that way,' McRae said. 'Revisiting it now _ one or two or three years after having written the song — I have an appreciation for how, like, of course people are going to have these songs resonate with them. Because of course I'm not the only person who's gone through these feelings.' 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New York Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Meet Jensen McRae and 3 Other Artists on the Rise
They come from different coasts and countries, with sounds ranging from folk pop to hard-nosed rap to otherworldly electronics. And this year, they're all releasing new music, going on tour or both. Jon Pareles, the chief pop music critic at The New York Times, spotlights four ascendant artists: Jensen McRae, J Noa, Oklou and Mei Semones. The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven't already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.
