There was never a time for Jensen McRae where she wasn’t trying to make songs. “Basically from the time I could talk I loved to sing— I just made a lot of noise,” she said. The Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter makes vulnerable folk-edged pop that can feel like an intimate look into Jensen’s head. In some ways, they are. “It became my medium of choice when I had a big feeling,” she said.
Over the last few years, Jensen’s been steadily releasing songs—a couple EPs during her time studying music at USC, and then her 2019 single “White Boy”, which gained wider attention. After a viral tweet in 2021 where Jensen joked about a fake song by Phoebe Bridgers (retweeted by Bridgers herself), the artist followed up with the song “Immune”, a fictionalized account of getting vaccinated that received nods from places like Rolling Stone. With all that momentum, it came as no surprise that her debut album, 2022’s Are You Happy Now, was met with love from listeners.
Recently, the artist traded in LA sunshine for gray afternoons, spending a month in London as Sofar’s Artist in Residence.
“I have this joke that all [American] teenage girls are either a London girl or a Paris girl—you were either obsessed with something English, or took French in school and carried an Eiffel Tower tote bag,” Jensen said. “I was a London girl.”
The month involved playing shows around the city, even debuting a few new ones. “There’s something about when you’re writing a song and making the demo immediately after writing it, where you play it the best—I think it can be similar when you play a song live for the first time, because you’re so conscious of it,” Jensen said. “There are songs I’ve played hundreds of times and they’re sort of mechanical and I have to drop back into my body intentionally to connect to it. But when you’re playing a song live that you’ve never played live before, you’re already dropped in.”
When she wasn’t performing in London, days were spent writing, and the gray afternoons helped that process. “It felt like a nice cloak and support to process large feelings,” Jensen McRae said. “There wasn’t pressure to be outside soaking up sunshine, it was encouraged that I’d be inside working at my piano.”
Now back in LA, Jensen’s working on a new collection, though it’s not clear what the second record might be yet. “I know I want it to be that’s representative of my adult self,” she said. “I no longer want to self identify with the coming of age narrative, I’ve come of age. I love to be the bookish girl, the outcast girl, these things that brought me to this point, but I’m also curious who else could I be and who else will I be as I get older?”
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For Jensen it’s not just about self-examination, but representation for others drawn to that same vulnerability. “I want my work to be a tile in the mosaic of the Black female experience,” she said. “I really want to be an emblem of what it means to be a Black woman who makes folk music. It’s a space that historically shut us out that I’m clawing my way into, come hell or high water.”
She continued:
“I want to be an option for a role model for Black women who haven’t been able to see themselves in the larger-than-life Black female figures that have entered pop culture. There’s not a lot of room for Black women to be soft and vulnerable and sensitive and fragile. Black women are superheroes and strong and independent and they carry the world on their back. [But] sometimes we have the nervous breakdown, and sometimes we are just crying and have our head in our journal. I want to be that.”
Words by Sofar Editorial Team
