Jensen McRae is a word girl.
The 27-year-old singer-songwriter from Santa Monica, California talks with her hands and uses words in conversation that only a writer with a monstrous vocabulary would know.
It’s crucial to understand that the musician, whose sophomore album I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! is out today, April 25, is a writer first — a perspective she’s held since she was just a young girl armed with a pen, eager to define the world.
She tells me she’s more Nick Carraway than Jay Gatsby, a main character who makes the conscious choice to narrate, one more invested in recording than carrying the plot on her back. But McRae says she’s “endured” so much plot over the past two years of her life — including a string of viral singles, opening for Noah Kahan's North American tour, and two back-to-back, world-shattering breakups — that she found she had enough narrative thread to weave a sophomore album together.
“My mom said to me recently, ‘You're so good at being sad,’” McRae laughs. But if you ask McRae, she’s a master of feeling. Her diaristic and almost journalistic tendencies make for rich lyricism and vast world building in her songs, and paired with the ageless texture of her voice, Jensen McRae’s music is basically designed to weld a broken heart. Even with a writer's mighty lexicon, this is why McRae's music is connective, accessible: everybody knows the stunning pain of love.
Below, Jensen McRae sits down with Teen Vogue to discuss writing her genre-expansive second full-length album, unexpectedly befriending Justin Bieber, her dreams of collaborating with Kendrick Lamar, and how she’s repeatedly written her way through the ends of many worlds.
Jensen McRae: I think evolution can totally be painful, and for me, the painful part was the things I had to go through in my personal life to be able to make this. But the making of the album felt great. It felt like having a big stretch, like being able to do something physically that you've been training to do for a long time and finally executing it.
It still feels familiar, like, for fans of mine who listened to the first album and have been sitting with it for a while, this won't feel like a huge left turn by any means. But I appreciate the term “decisive,” because that is what I feel was a big part of this process, was being super deliberate, and wanting there to be no fat.
I did not want this to be an album with skips on it — and obviously no one wants that, no artist wants that — but there are a lot of people who are like, “I wrote so many songs for this project and I want to put them all out because I love them so much.” Yeah, there's a lot of songs I wrote that I love in the last couple of years, but this is going to [include] only the ones I am certain are going to stand the test of time. Like, “I love it, I don't know if other people are going to like it!" No, I'm certain about all of these songs.
Having an 11-song album — the runtime on a lot of the songs, [they're] not very long either. I just really wanted it to be so focused and tight, and I also want people to want to go back and listen to it again. So many albums that I love, you keep coming back for more. You listen to the whole thing and you're like, Wait, wait, wait. I need to go back and listen to it all again. That's what I want people to have with this album.
JM: The number of songs in the vault is incalculable. [Laughs] In terms of songs that were really in contention, there's probably another 10 to 15 songs that I thought about and really liked — which is not to say that those will never come out, because they might — but the [biggest] part of the criteria was just making sure I wasn't repeating myself. This album tells the story of these two relationships that happened in close succession, and I wanted to touch on a lot of different nuanced parts of the healing process.
The thing about going through that healing process is you end up writing about the same sensation or the same incident many, many times in order to get it right or to process it. I wanted to make sure that every song that ended up on the album was the best representation of that feeling or that period, [and avoid repeating] something someone else had already said, because, obviously, everyone's written a breakup album. That's not new. But what am I bringing to this canon?
JM: Healing is not linear, and you can't punish yourself for feeling like you take a step forward and then two steps back. You can't punish yourself for actively grieving multiple relationships at once. You can't punish yourself for processing genuine trauma, abuse, and heartbreak… Feeling like a breakup is going to kill you is a natural human feeling, but it's not true.
When you're in the thick of it, you really feel like the world is ending. I feel like most people have one of those in their life where [they're] like, It's all over for me. Inevitably, you get to a point where you don't feel that way anymore.
For anyone who listens to this album when they're in the actual trenches, I just want them to know: I believe you that you feel like the world is ending, and I also promise you that it's not.
It's a really interesting thing to figure out what album had just come out when you went through your breakup — for me, it was SOS by SZA. That album came out a week after my big, terrible breakup. Fans of mine are going to listen to this a week after they got dumped, and they're going to be like, “This album is now defining my breakup era.”
JM: Back To the Future is a movie basically for kids, [but] it's a great example of a super linear hero's journey. And like I've said many times, “This album's about how healing isn't linear.” When you're going through something that is so confusing, tangled, and grown-up, you want to escape into a story where there's a beginning, a middle, and end.
The evolution that Marty McFly goes through is super clear, and he's a different person at the end of the movie. Even though he's going back in time, he's processing everything. You watch that evolution happen in a way that's relatively easy and frictionless, and I think that's a really comforting narrative thread to be following when you're going through something that is the opposite of frictionless.
A big part of this album, because it's about two relationships that happen back-to-back, it's like— I didn't have time to process the first one, because I just escaped into the second one. “Savannah” is a great example of what I realized, which is that you can run, but you can't hide. Your ghosts are there. You can go to another state, you can get into a new relationship, and guess what? You still have to process the things that have happened to you.
JM: Yep! To me, the title is a reference in that way. Like, “I shouldn't have to be dealing with this! How did these emotions and these scary things catch up to me when I was running away from them as fast as I could?” You don't have a choice. Everything that's inside of you is going to remain inside of you until you confront it and actually get it out of yourself through therapy, through talking to your friends, through creating art, through exercise, whatever means you need. It's one of the other big messages of the album: the only way out of that pain is to go deeper into yourself and really sit with it.
JM: That one, I actually fully was like, “I'm writing an anthem today.” [Laughs] I literally had that goal in my heart. I wanted to write a song called “Let Me Be Wrong” for a long time, I thought that was a cool title. Then, when I wrote it, it was a couple of weeks after I got back from being on tour with MUNA, and I had sang “Silk Chiffon” with them a few times. Every time I sang it, I just had this feeling like I needed to have moments like that in my own live show, and I hadn't ever. So I came back [wanting] to write a song that is very buoyant, exuberant, big, and loud.
At that point, the idea of a second album was just a mirage in the distance, but I was like, “When I do this, and when I go on a real headlining tour, I want there to be a moment in the show where everyone's screaming and jumping and feels like they can really release everything.”
JM: Oh, wow. Post-this album? “Trying to Be Brave,” or trying to be braver. I think the second album is brave. I'm trying to dig even deeper, and not even necessarily just about myself. I'm having to probe my own life and my own stories more, but also writing about the world more critically and trying to tell other people's stories or other kinds of stories.
The few songs I've written in the last few months… I feel like I've been moved by that more than writing about myself. Not that I find myself boring, but fortunately, there's not a whole lot going on in my personal life right now… It's me being a lot more philosophical and [taking a] bird's eye view, and trying to write about things that are much bigger than me.
JM: I feel like you still are focusing on yourself in a way. You're focusing on your specific somatic experience of collective experiences. In my recent iterations of going to therapy, there's a lot less talking, because I'm very good at intellectualizing my feelings and my therapist will stop me as soon as she hears me doing that.
“Where do you feel that in your body? What do we feel right now? Is it in your head? Is it in your stomach? Is it in your throat? And can you breathe into that part of your body, and move through the physical sensation of what's happening to you?”
It's made me pay a lot more attention to the physical sensation of my feelings, because something that she taught me [is] if you're thinking it in your head with words, that's thoughts. If it's in your body, that's a feeling. Thoughts and feelings are different. So now I pay a lot more attention to my physical body and to the physical sensation of what accompanies my racing thoughts, and I try to transmit that into those songs because I'm like, if I'm feeling like my stomach is in knots or I'm dizzy and lightheaded, surely someone else is also experiencing this.
Thinking about the everyday observations and sightings that take place when something massive and seismic is happening in the world. When I was writing “Earthquake Yellow”— there's a line about when there's all green lights on Fountain. I live in L.A., and when you're driving on Fountain, you're just hitting red light after red light after red light. Anyone who lives in Los Angeles will [hear that lyrics] and be like, “I know exactly what you're talking about.”
What are everyday human experiences that are still going on while the world is undergoing this massive shift, and how can I focus on both the individual human somatic experience of historical events, and how the quotidian events of everyday continue to go on during historical events, and how can talking about both of those things still feel like it's addressing this massive elephant in the room?
Because that's what's most compelling, I think, about archiving life and archiving everyday life. Like, yeah, the world was ending, and we still to go to the grocery store, and you still have to pick up your kid from school, and all these things. The world doesn't stop. And it's the same way with grief. The world doesn't stop moving when you're grieving, and the world also doesn't stop moving when your country is undergoing a big shift, or when there's a natural disaster in your city. Stuff just doesn't stop, and you have to just keep chasing it. That's the feeling I think I'm trying to get at.
JM: When I was little, I had a big ego. I was like, five, being like, I am a star. My belief in myself and my talent far outstripped my actual ability for a very, very, very long time. It's only now that it's starting to catch up to itself. I still have so much to learn as a songwriter, and I have so much room to grow. When I was a kid, I wasn't bad, but I was just a kid writing songs. I thought the songs I was writing at 13 should have won Grammys. I was completely delusional.
We're close in age, and [the historical moment] that we grew up in, I thought history was over. We were 11 when Obama was elected. I was like, “So I'm not going to live through anything. We fixed everything!”
I spent my whole childhood thinking I'm not going to be an activist, I won't be an ancestor. That's not going to be my story, because I'm coming of age in a time where there have never been more advancements for women and people of color and queer people. "Things are moving in a good direction." And obviously, because I was a kid, I didn't notice all the horrible omens happening around me that augur this moment now. So now... I know I'm an ancestor. I know all this stuff that I have to do.
Instagram content
I don't think I anticipated it at all. Even during the first Trump administration, I wasn't writing about politics a whole lot. It wasn't until the pandemic happened when I wrote that song “The Plague," and it didn't go viral or anything. It was a small thing for a group of people who found it. They enjoyed it, and it was healing, and I'm glad that I made it. But it was in that moment where I [realized], I'm going to feel called to keep writing about all this stuff that's happening, because there's going to be more stuff like this.
When I was a child thinking about my career [and] what I hoped it would be, never in a million years was I like, I'm going to be doing protest music. I didn't even really listen to Bob Dylan! I didn't know about Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. I was listening to Alicia Keys, [who] wasn't making political music in the 2000s, at least not to my recollection. I thought I was going to do that.
And I don't take myself particularly seriously. I don't think that my music is going to change the course of history by any stretch of the imagination. But I do feel like I am good at writing about big things in a way that still feels small and contained and thinkable, and I want to continue doing that, because I definitely do get feedback from people [saying], “This helped me put into words this thing that is swirling around in my mind.” That's all I want to do: give people who don't have the words, the words.
JM: No, I don't think I've earned that at all. There's so many people doing so much more than I could or would ever do. I think the music itself is activist music. It's protest music. In times of great change, it's everyone's job to go where they're needed, and do what they're best at. I know I'm good at writing songs. I don't think I have any business running for office. I don't think I have any business doing community organizing. I think my job is to make this music that either is soundtracking those events, or provides an escape for the people who are doing that work, and they just want to come home and put on something that they love.
I do have plans as my platform grows to hopefully speak to the government and advocate for the causes that are important to me, and also [at] my shows and in my spaces to create places that are accessible to everyone… But for myself, it's a title that I think even if someone else put it on me, I'd be like... it's like being called a genius. I'm just like, what? I don't think so.
JM: We didn't speak after that. [Laughs] He posted it, and he followed me, and we DM'd ... I DM'd him and I was like, “Thank you so much.” And he was like, “Oh my God, thank you.” I think I gave him my phone number and was like, “Let me know if you ever want to write, or hang, or whatever.” And then he just never answered me, because he's a busy guy!
I sent him “Massachusetts” when it came out, but I think it was right before his baby was born. I was like, “Congrats on the baby, here's ‘Massachusetts!'” [Laughs] Again, I didn't hear from him, and I was like, okay, whatever this was [it] was a one-time thing. Then a couple of weeks ago, he just randomly was watching all my Instagram Lives for the rollout process. He was just in there. I thought it was a mistake at first, but then he posted that he was in there, and then he came back another time and was in the chat like, “You're blessing us with these Lives, queen!” I was like, what's happening?
We messaged a little bit more, and then the day “Savannah” came out, he messaged me and was like, “What are you doing today?” I was like, “ Nothing.” And he was like, “Okay, what's your phone number?” And then seconds later, I had a text from an unknown number, and he was like, “It's JB," sent an address, was like, “Come over, I have an idea.” And I was like, what's happening?!
So I went to his house and we had a great time. It was me and him and all these other great writers and producers, and he's just so sweet. He is an incredibly sweet guy and really loves people, and really loves connecting people, and loves being in a creative environment where there's a lot of people working together. You know how there's some people that just love to curate a hang? I think he just loved bringing us all together in one place.
And it's been obviously really cool for me to see someone who's been so successful for so long. Getting to watch him write was just so… He's one of the most talented musicians I've ever seen in real life. The way he would jump from instrument to instrument, and be amazing on all of them, and the way his voice sounds perfect in the room with nothing on it, it's just incredibly inspiring.
Instagram content
It's crazy to me that he's inspired by me and it's crazy how sweet he is. You are the most famous boy in the world. Why are you so nice? Like you're just really, really kind. And I think that's something that I noticed with him and with Noah [Kahan], is these are two people that really all they want to do is just make music. Literally, all they want to do all day long is either be on stage, or in a studio, just jamming indefinitely forever with their friends. That is their dream day. You would hope that's what all musicians are like.
JM: Kendrick Lamar.
JM: I either want to sing a hook on one of his songs, or I want to have him have rap a verse on one of my songs.
JM: No. I was really resentful… I think it's cool, and it suits me [now], but when I was a kid, I just wanted a normal girl's name, and I was really mad that I had a super unique name.
JM: Sagittarius Moon, Cancer Rising.
JM: Period! Literally period. I just had Drew Afualo on my podcast and she's a Virgo Sun, Cancer Moon, Sagittarius Rising. I was like, I'm with you. [Makes mind-melding gesture]
JM: [My] growth as a lyricist. Words are always going to be the most important thing to me, and there's so many lines on this album that I'm really impressed with myself for having written, and I'm just like, bars, bars, bars, bars.
JM: “Keep whistling, boy / I was never your dog.” I really do love that line a lot.
JM: That's so hard. “All That Matters” maybe.
JM: I love Lightskin Bieber.
