Jensen McRae is writing music that feeds the soul

From our first exchanges when we sit down to talk, she reveals herself as both an astute observer of the world around her as well as thoughtful participant in it. The way McRae describes her experiences, the things that move her, and the things that motivate her are all indicative of someone who both has something to say and knows how to say it.

These are qualities McRae’s songwriting shares, too. At 27, McRae is writing some of the most thoughtful, relatable, and empathetic folk pop out there, the next – but markedly distinct – act of the Carole King, Taylor Swift, Maggie Rogers, Phoebe Bridgers, lineage. McRae has now successfully navigated not just one but two viral moments, signed to the label of her dreams, and is set to release her second album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! in April. Not to mention her legion of devotees seems to double by the month.

“Whenever I ask my mom, ‘Should I have done something else?’ she’s like, ‘Let’s be honest. What were you gonna do? Were you gonna be a surgeon? No. Just do the thing you’re good at,’” McRae says with a laugh. At the time of our conversation, music is at a strange moment. Fires have been raging across McRae’s native L.A., Donald Trump has been elected and started wreaking havoc, and the world is, generally, pretty upside down. We talk briefly about how music, in the face of all of that, can sometimes seem small. But it can also be an answer in the darkness, a steady comfort in chaos.

Just a day prior, McRae posted an unreleased snippet – a habit of hers that delights the Internet over and over again – that addresses the fires head-on, a love letter to her home and community. Other times, she’ll address societal unrest, or maybe she’ll just strum along to some poetic verse about love or family or friends. Whatever the subject matter, listening to McRae is like getting a voice note from a friend, like saying the quiet part out loud, like feeling entirely seen and known. And that’s exactly what McRae wants to use her gift to do. “I guess writing is the crutch,” she tells me.

Born and raised in L.A., McRae tells me she’s always been a compulsive writer and journaler (she has, staggeringly, completed over fifteen of them). Music and songwriting complimented those early interests, and she was supported to follow that passion to the popular music program at the Thornton School of Music, from which she graduated in 2019. At the beginning of her senior year, her now-manager Kristin Gregory discovered her on Instagram and invited her to a show. The pair quickly connected with Armand Troy, McRae’s second manager, and Rakhi, the iconic producer behind McRae’s first batch of releases, and started building from the ground up.

“I had, like, no followers,” McRae says. “I had just put out an EP that my friends had helped me produce and photograph for free slash for very little money … And I think all of them were looking for something untapped and undiscovered that they could help shape and shepherd along. Of course, now that I am where I am, they’re all exhausted and they’re like, ‘That was really hard!’ But it was something that they wanted and obviously something that I wanted. I needed the help, and I needed people to just to get the thing off the ground. I’ve been writing songs forever, and I knew my songs were great, but I didn’t know how to do anything else besides write songs.”

McRae’s first viral moment happened entirely by accident. It was 2021, deep into the pandemic, and she joked on Twitter about how once all was said and done, Phoebe Bridgers would probably release some painfully specific but also absurd track about hooking up in a parking lot waiting to get vaccinated. Fair enough. After some early traction, McRae followed it up with an early snippet of what said song would sound like. It caught, with Bridgers herself even sharing the clip.

“When that happened, no one knew who I was. And so to be reposted by celebrities and trending on Twitter, I was like, ‘Ah! There’s too many people looking at me!’ I’d never experienced that much attention on anything I’d done, so I felt very scared and overwhelmed and overstimulated,” McRae admits. “That was both incredibly gratifying and incredibly terrifying.”

But none of those nerves showed in the moment. Instead, McRae masterfully grabbed hold of the opportunity like a speeding train, taking that newfound notoriety all the way through to her 2022 debut, Are You Happy Now? The collection is confessional but catchy, an early indicator of McRae’s knack for the kind of songwriting that’s both intellectually stimulating and has listeners coming back for more and more and more.

Are You Happy Now? took McRae’s notoriety to the next level – her promo included a run with Noah Kahan, which she says was both riddled with imposter syndrome and also the best nights of her life – and now she’s back for more. Working now with Dead Oceans, McRae is bringing full circle a prophecy that started with a retweet. The Indiana-based label is, after all, the home of Bridgers and her Saddest Factory imprint, as well as many of McRae’s other idols including Mitski and Japanese Breakfast.

“I made a list of things I wanted to achieve by 2019, 2020, 2021, and there were also things that were out of time, like people I wanted to work with and things I wanted to do. I made a list of my dream labels, and Dead Oceans was the top one. To have found my way there six years after maxing that list… It’s an absolute dream come true,” she says.

“I was super stubborn about it,” McRae says, telling me that she never intended to have the track on her album in the first place. “I was like, ‘I feel like I know what the album is and ‘Massachussetts’ is not on it.' And then after the Bieber report, I was like, ‘Alright, so I do, in fact, have to record this song.’ I did it immediately."

“Artists are famously not excellent judges of their own work,” McRae adds. A natural perfectionist, she has a tendency – like many – to be too hard on herself, discarding tracks that turn out to be winners when she doesn’t feel like she’s got them just right. “I’m trying to learn that when enough people weight in and when the right people weight in to say ‘this is good,’ I follow that.”

But McRae is careful to note that she’s chasing more than just numbers. Rather, what she’s after is long-term connection, the kind that sustains itself between artists and audiences over the arc of a long-term career.

“One of the things I’ve always said when it comes to my audience is that I want the people who need me to find me, and that’s the reach that I’m content to have,” McRae says. “Obviously, it’s really cool to have casual fans and people who know one song and nothing else… But I feel like my music lends itself to having a more profound relationship between listener and art.”

On I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, McRae picks up everything from drunk texts to doing – or not doing – drugs to trying to change a man that everyone knows won’t. The songs are some of her most personal yet, each word penned and placed carefully, she tells me.

“Even when I write it really quickly, it’s extremely deliberate,” McRae says. And yet, despite the work being achingly honest, part of the beauty of McRae’s practice is the release of finally allowing those truths to be shared with the world. “I also know that as soon as I record, it just doesn’t belong to me anymore and that it has so little to do with me anymore. It’s so much more about other people’s experiences of it,” she continues. “I’m always really delighted when people find the things that I left for them to find, and I’m sometimes more delighted when people find the things that I didn’t think were there.”

“I think of myself as an excellent songwriter. And I think the mark of an excellent songwriter is that you don’t even realize what you’re doing 20% of the time. 80% of the time you’re working hard, doing meticulous labor to make something excellent, and then the rest of the time it’s like, you’ve done all the work and so your spirit is just doing the rest of it for you,” she explains.

As much as writing is a healing exercise for McRae herself, she also sees it as something that can help others. She wants to write music that, she hopes, people can see themselves in – especially in genres like folk that have been gatekept from too many communities for far too long.

“One of my favourite pieces of feedback that I’ve ever gotten is from trans girls telling me that they like that they can sing my songs because my voice is so low,” McRae says. “That’s what I’m talking about! That’s the kind of thing that is the point of folk music – to be an outsider and to be seen and to be heard. To tell really specific, niche stories in a way that still feels universal. And so when I can make music that not only reaches other marginalized people – whose experiences might not overlap with mine – but also can reach the straight white guys, that’s what it’s all about.”

To record the album, McRae made the storied pilgrimage down to Brad Cook’s studio in North Carolina. The state seems to be the new it-place for the folk scene, with scores of favourites from Waxahatchee to Bon Iver to Hippo Campus heading down to work with Cook.

“It was literally the best ever, it felt like summer camp,” McRae says of the process. Alongside Cook, McRae worked with a few engineers, Nathan Stocker of Hippo Campus, and, of course, her brother Holden, who acts as her keyboardist. “If you’re not rocking with Holden, you’re not holding with me.” Though the process was incredibly fun, it was also diligent. Not a moment was wasted, and McRae says she soaked up as much of Cook’s mastery by osmosis as humanly possible. “He has no agenda. He has no ego. Like, he just loves good music, and he loves every kind of good music. He doesn’t care how old you are. He doesn’t care about your cache. If he believes in the music, that’s the only thing that’s important,” McRae says of Cook’s work.

As McRae approaches album time again, she seems more confident than ever. Years of preparation have gone into this moment, and with the success of “Massachusetts” and her debut behind her, McRae might just be looking at another exponential, unexpected level-up. It would certainly be welcome and deserved, but it would not be without its own complications. An introvert by nature, McRae has a tendency to hyper fixate and overanalyze – hence the songwriting, she tells me. While those traits make a great verse, they don’t always lend themselves to life in the spotlight or on the road. Regardless, McRae knows what she’s signed up for. In fact, she welcomes it with open arms.

“Presuming the album does what I want it to do, the album will cause me to reach more people than I have in the past,” McRae says. “I spent a lot of time alone in 2023 and 2024, and I think I banked a lot of solitude. Having that is going to be really important. … And, I just remember to continue to carve out all these things for myself. Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I just put on Stevie Wonder or Corrinne Bailey Rae, and my blood pressure goes down.”

“It’s like, I heard Alecia Keys when I was five and was like, ‘Alright, that’s what I’m gonna do for the rest of my life,’” she continues. “Whenever I’m led astray from that, whenever it’s like, ‘Oh, I really want this opportunity! I want to hit this milestone! I want to do this tour!’ … That’s not why I became a musician. The reason I became a musician is because of that pure joy I felt when I was little. And so I always try to retreat to that when things get overwhelming.”