“I don’t know if I’ve ever fully healed from anything that’s happened,” Jensen McRae says. That’s the crux of her new album I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, the 27-year-old’s sophomore album and first on Dead Oceans (Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers).
McRae, who was raised in Santa Monica, California, has joked about feeling like she had a sheltered childhood. But as her career kicked off, the highs and lows of her twentysomething life were hitting unprecedented extremes: breakups, arena tours, health issues, and newfound success all came crashing down at once.
“It felt like a lot of growing up and a lot of learning got crammed into a really short amount of time,” she admits. “It reminded me of that quote that’s like, ‘You can have it all but they neglect to tell you that you probably won’t have it all at the same time.’”
To process it, she turned to writing. Single “Savannah” was penned one week after her debut album Are You Happy Now? came out. Her previous relationship had ended for traumatic reasons she hinted at in social media posts leading up to its release. In a Substack post about the song titled “The Thing I’m Not Saying,” she uses the subhead “TW: SA,” standing for “trigger warning: sexual assault.”
“I want to protect myself and to keep some parts of my life private, my experiences, private, but I also want to invite other people to find themselves and experiences and for me, one of the ways I want to do that is by leaving some details open to interpretation,” she says of both the song and post.
She wrote “Savannah” alone in her room about a trip to the city it’s named after. As she was running away from one relationship, McRae found herself slipping into another. Over the course of touring in support of her debut and beginning to write new material, that relationship would end as well. As she mourned the ends of both relationships, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! began to form into a reflection of the messy grieving and healing processes of heartbreak.
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“I wanted to reflect the way that healing isn’t linear,” she explains. “When you think you’ve processed something, something new will happen in your life, and then it turns out, the first thing is going to rear its head again. And then something from five years before that is going to rear its head that you didn’t think was going to come up.”
McRae wrote the majority of her new album in 2023 but it didn’t start to feel like a real, cohesive project to her until March of last year, when she went down to North Carolina to work with producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee). They spent ten days together tinkering with the arrangements of the final tracklist she had put together, a dream collaboration for McRae who had long been a fan of Cook’s work.
“Brad understood vision and the pieces that weren’t yet there,” she recalls. He just immediately knew where to place them. “Every minute of my ten days down there was so fulfilling and creatively nourishing and stimulating.”
Outside of her relationships and time in the studio, McRae’s life was becoming both more exciting and more complicated. The success and buzz surrounding Are You Happy Now? put her on tours with Muna and Noah Kahan, the latter of which saw her playing arenas for the first time. But during the pandemic, she was diagnosed with two types of chronic illness: a thyroid condition and chronic hives.
“Touring is a real challenge for me,” she admits. Keeping herself healthy means she needs a thorough COVID action plan for herself and her crew but also that she is eating a restrictive diet that sometimes counters the physical demands of being on the road. “I’m very conscious about masking and making sure that I don’t get sick. It’s a constant battle of self-monitoring and making sure that I have enough energy and making sure I’m drinking enough water, getting enough sleep.”
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Like getting over emotional pain, McRae knows that overcoming those challenges just means utilizing a toolbox she’s already assembled. Her new album was written and produced with her live shows in mind; she’ll set off on a North American tour next month and couldn’t be more excited to step on stage.
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“My life is just opening up in ways that I never imagined,” she says. She’s making plenty of new fans and friends lately: not long after we talk, she shares a video with Justin Bieber, who has gushed about her music in the past. She’s in the background of a video he would also share of him jamming in his home with other musicians.
“It is really cool to look at myself in the mirror and look at my life and be like, ‘That’s a woman who’s lived a real adult life and is going to continue to live a real adult life,’” she says. “I’ve now proven to myself that there’s nothing that I can’t overcome, and there’s no difficult experience that will ever best me. And that’s really cool.”
