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.
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“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.
Teen Vogue: The album is excellent and it’s tight, and I was so impressed by how decisive it felt. That’s what I want to start with: This project really does feel like such an evolution in your sound. Evolution is actually kind of painful, and people don’t talk about it enough. How do you feel you’ve changed as a songwriter, and as a woman, since your last project?
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.
