Jensen McRae makes authentic folk-pop the internet can't resist

NEW YORK (AP) — As the COVID-19 vaccine began distributing more widely in early 2021, California-raised singer-songwriter Jensen McRae affectionally joked in a tweet that Phoebe Bridgers would release a song in two years about “hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at Dodger Stadium.”

Bridgers didn’t release the song, but McRae did. As took off, she threaded of herself singing “a preemptive cover." penned by McRae in Bridgers' contemplative style, was released in full within two weeks.

“It was a perfect storm,” McRae, 27, told The Associated Press. “I was parodying Phoebe Bridgers who was becoming world famous in that exact moment. ... I was also writing about this topic that everyone was thinking about constantly because we were in lockdowns." Bridgers reposted the video, writing simply: “oh my god.”

The song preluded McRae's debut EP, released in 2021, and album, in 2022, which led to touring gigs with and . Last year, she signed with Dead Oceans, the same record label that represents Bridgers. McRae's sophomore album, the folk-pop “I Don’t Know How, But They Found Me!,” is out Friday.

The title is a reference to “Back to The Future,” her favorite movie. It's a line of dialogue said by scientist Doc Brown just before he falls in a hail of bullets, causing protagonist Marty McFly to flee back in time in Brown's rigged DeLorean.

“At the end of the movie — which, there’s no spoilers, because this movie’s 40 years old — you find out (Doc) was wearing a bulletproof vest the whole time. And that to me sort of is what my 20s have been like. There are all these events that are happening that feel like they should take me out, but I just keep standing up anyway," McRae said. “That's kind of the narrative of the album.”

Resilience has long been a motif in McRae’s songwriting. Her debut album, “Are You Happy Now?”, deftly tackled sexual predators and racist microaggressions with poetic meditations on identity, love, growth and beauty. On the album’s most-streamed song, the ballad “My Ego Dies in the End,” she sings, “If I don’t write about it, was it really worth it?”

"There’s this quote that I can’t cite, but someone said, as a writer, you’ve experienced enough by the age of 25 to have writing material for the rest of your life. I don’t know if everyone agrees with that statement, but I certainly do,” McRae said. It’s years of practice, and reflection, that have brought clarity to those experiences.

“I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!” is composed of songs McRae wrote throughout her early 20s, in the wake of one relationship and the rise and fall of another. She finished the album last spring in North Carolina with producer Brad Cook, a collaborator of , and . The 10 days they spent on the record, McRae said, were “a master class.”

“Jensen flat out blew me away on every single level," said Cook, who met McRae for the first time when she arrived for the session. “I got a master class from her as well, frankly. Jensen's just so organized, emotionally and spiritually, it was just really easy to go where the songs needed to go."

of McRae singing the first verse of her song “ ," accrued millions of TikTok views in the fall of 2023, well before it was released in full in July 2024.

While the internet’s interest in “Immune" two years prior was momentarily destabilizing (“There’s a meme of Patrick (from ‘SpongeBob’) coming home to his rock, and there are all these eyes poking out and he goes, ‘Who are you people?’ That was what I felt like,” McRae says), its embrace of “Massachusetts” was confusing for other reasons.

McRae was in the process of making this album, and the snippet she shared felt separate from the narrative she was constructing. Despite an onslaught of comments from listeners asking for the full song, she considered leaving it unreleased or tabling it for much later.

Then she got a huge cosign. “When posted about it, I was like, well, you forced my hand," McRae laughs. “So then I changed course.”

The solution, she realized, was that “Massachusetts" — a song about the specific memories that don't leave you when a relationship ends — would be the conclusion to the album's story. Cook kept the song's production minimal, centering McRae's vocals and acoustic guitar. “Every rhythm just reinforces that,” he said. “This whole record, I would say, is a lesson in getting out of the way of the song as much as you’re reinforcing it.”

McRae hasn't been able to diagnose exactly why fans online are drawn to certain songs like “Massachusetts" over others. Cook says it's the same amorphous quality that drives all good music: honesty. “I think that the beauty of authenticity is it’s just so powerful that you don’t know why,” he said.

In any case, McRae has worked to keep her brushes with internet fame from swaying her creative process. “Every decision I’m making about this is like, ‘Do I want this?’ And ‘Is this going to be a good move for my career?’” she said. “Because eventually, no matter what I do, the viral moment passes.”

But fans' reactions have helped her recognize what makes her deeply personal songs relatable — especially as she, too, considers the project with fresh ears and new perspective ahead of an upcoming tour.

“When you’re going through something difficult, intellectually, you know you’re not the first person to whom it’s happened. But it feels that way," McRae said. “Revisiting it now — one or two or three years after having written the song — I have an appreciation for how, like, of course people are going to have these songs resonate with them. Because of course I’m not the only person who’s gone through these feelings.”