Jensen McRae On Growth, Solitude and Love’s Lessons

In the making of her new album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, folk musician Jensen McRae rediscovered herself. The Los Angeles-raised artist sauntered from the dreamy innocence of her 2022 debut, Are You Happy Now?, into conflict with the ghosts of past breakups, those that left McRae disoriented and lost but eventually led her to find acceptance. The album’s title, which pulls from 1985 sci-fi classic Back to the Future, reminds us that even in life’s most bewildering moments, all will be healed.

As a singer-songwriter, McRae’s voice and pen have also helped fans find their way out of the darkness. In a TikTok posted in January, she dedicated a short acoustic ballad to Los Angeles amid the Southern California wildfires, some users praising the song’s emotional gravity. In a time when McRae was greatly overwhelmed–the wildfires erupted when she was performing in Mexico–her music still makes a profound connection.

“It’s not what anyone expected to happen and I’ve been fortunate like me and my family–none of us were directly impacted. Our homes are all fine,” McRae tells AFROPUNK. “But everyone knows someone who’s lost something and it’s been strange trying to get back to normal, more or less. I’ve also been traveling a lot, so it’s weird to be away from here and have places be so untouched by what happened.”

Being among Los Angelenos who’ve supported each other in rebuilding, at 27 years old, McRae has also settled into adulthood, with I Don’t Know How being a snapshot of cumulative life changes. Opener “The Rearranger” soars in like a rhapsodic backyard jam. “I Can Change Him” meets McRae in a place of denial. McRae’s freer side radiates on the uplifting and pop-oriented “Let Me Be Wrong,” and in the song’s second verse, she delivers a resonant message: “Nothing really shakes me now.” I Don’t Know How finds McRae at a crossroads, but while internalizing post-breakup grief–compounded by two relationships that ended back-to-back–she’s at her wisest.

“Anytime I go through anything, it’s not isolated; it’s like I’m reflecting back on all of the events that led up to it,” she says. “With these relationships happening in such quick succession, I had to be processing them both kind of simultaneously. Writing these songs was hugely helpful for that because it allowed me to figure out my thoughts and feelings about the breakups and maybe things that I hadn’t even realized while the relationships were happening.”

In having epiphanies about her exes, McRae, who hadn’t dated until she was 23, regained enough solitude to realize what her unhealthy relationship patterns were. “I really wanted to be consumed by the relationship and just put my whole self into it,” she admits. “And that meant when the second relationship ended, I was finally left alone with myself and I felt so much anxiety.”

Amid taking a deep dive to sort out her feelings, McRae found solace while visiting Durham, North Carolina, recording I Don’t Know How in the recording studio of her producer, Brad Cook. The presence of McRae’s exes loomed, but in a remote setting, the musician brought her pain to page while surrounded by a lush environment. 

“I felt like it was such a great way to make an album. One, because we were there for ten days. It was very much like a summer camp vibe of, We have this limited window to get as much done as we can,” McRae recalls.

“I know how to like to take vacations from the fast-paced vibes, but it still is impossible to fully separate from like other people and like the chaos of the city,” she continues. “And so being in a place like Durham was so quiet, it was so beautiful. Truly every single day it was like, I woke up, ate breakfast, went to the studio, came home, ate dinner, went to sleep. It was so focused.”

Among the longest pieces to finish was “Massachusetts,” McRae’s viral track where she makes cheeky Batman references and ponders an influential love of yore. McRae, who shared an early version of the song on TikTok in 2023, doesn’t rue her former partner but finds them inescapable through fond reflection. 

https://www.tiktok.com/@jensenmcrae/video/7298111512248405291?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

“I wanted to make sure that if it ever came out in a full form, it lived up to the excitement of the first part of the song, but also because I was in real time trying to figure out what I meant and what I wanted to say,” she says. “Because the song is about looking back on a breakup and feeling healed and feeling like the processing is finished. And I was like, Am I finished? Do I know what that means? Do I know what that feels like?”

The time that McRae spent in her last two relationships was transitory, but the musician has a perennial lane in contemporary folk music, looking to pioneers Tracy Chapman and Joni Mitchell as influences. McRae, who attended USC’s Thornton School of Music, now stands alongside fellow acts like Annahstasia, chlothegod, and Infinity Song’s Momo Boyd as women who are expanding folk and alternative rock.

“I get really excited, especially on social media, whenever I see other young Black women making the kind of music that I make, and it’s really encouraging because I don’t think I ever realized how many of us there are,” McRae says. “Some of them make music that sounds like my music, some of them are making emo music, some of them are making country. It’s so cool to see that breadth of what’s out there. And I think that there’s a lot of work to be done in terms of getting our flowers and getting recognized on a bigger level.”

McRae’s in community with modern folk up-and-comers, but she’s most encouraged by creatively moving forward. I Don’t Know How centers McRae in the throes of heartbreak, but it’s the album’s range from solemn (“Tuesday”) to invigorating (“Praying On Your Downfall”) that sees her as a genre-bending force.

“Something that I have always tried to do is give myself permission to try on different styles and work in different genres because you never know when you’re going to make something that sounds like you but still is surprising in some way,” McRae says. “That was a big part of whenever I make pop-sounding songs, there was a period of my life where I would have been like, ‘Oh, I need to give that to someone else.’ But I’m realizing now that everything I make really does still sound like me.”

On I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, McRae gives an authentic representation of late twentysomething womanhood with a potency that somehow relates to all in transformative phases. She’s genuine in sound and offers hope for listeners with personal push-pull struggles.

“I want people to be able to see a path through like the thickets of what’s coming for them in the later part of this very important decade,” McRae says. “You’re inevitably going to go through a lot of things that you don’t think you can survive, but you will.”