Jensen McRae could've been down for the count.
"The most profound choices of my life,” she says, “have often felt like things I did before I was ready to do, and I had to grow into them.” McRae’s songs have a way of giving shape to these leaps, cliff jumps and trust falls, and on her new album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, Jensen McRae goes further than ever, evolving from a promising young artist to a fully grown songwriter and star. “It’s about realizing what you can’t outrun, and what follows when you have withstood what you thought might crush you,” she explains. “There are things that can happen to us—unthinkable, untenable things—that threaten our safety in our own bodies. They happen, and you feel like the only option is escape. In truth, the only way out is in—back into the place you have always lived.” The home – with Jensen front-and-center, possibly leaving, possibly arriving – adorns the artwork for I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!”. “You can leave the city, you can leave the lover,” McRae continues, “but you can never leave yourself.”
From the very beginning, fans have fallen in love with Jensen McRae for the sharp, evocative and clear-eyed songwriting. An avid journaler, McRae has been breathlessly documenting her existence since she was 18. Her first album, Are You Happy Now?, was a mission statement for the artist who grew up an automatic outsider: a Black Jewish girl from Los Angeles, hellbent on making folk music in spite of the world's attempts to box her into other, more stereotypically Black genres. McRae looked to her songwriting heroes (Alicia Keys, Carole King, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder) to build a sonic world all her own. As her audience grew and with myriad doors began unlocking, it "became the record of my coming-of-age. But it was a quiet coming-of-age, one that mostly took place inside my own head."
McRae's voice expertly embodies both the heartbreak of being left and of doing the leaving. On top of her excellent songwriting, McRae simply has an exceptional, acrobatic voice. Wispy and textured at times, clear and bright at others, McRae’s singing is surprising and multidimensional in much the same way as her lyrics. When the country-adjacent stealth single “Savannah” hits its crescendo, for example, it’s clear McRae is an artist with her own singular power, as piano layers with guitar and McRae delivers a series of scathing indictments with grit and conviction: "You swore you'd raise our kids to end up just like you / well you're a false prophet / and that's a goddamn promise." "Let Me Be Wrong" is a buoyant ode to rejecting perfectionism. Built on a simple melody and acoustic guitar, it grows step over step; guitars layer, drums pick up the pace, and when McRae growls “fuck those girls got everything” it’s a punch of both power and
vulnerability, begging to be shouted in unison with the biggest possible crowd.
