I first heard Jensen McRae’s voice in November of last year. I was watching concert clips and babies with puppies on TikTok in what would turn out to be one of my more fruitful late-night doom-scrolling sessions, when I stopped at the mention of my home state. “Can’t decide on a title,” the caption read, accompanying the minute and a half long clip of what would become the first verse and chorus of “Massachusetts” as we know it today.

“When someone tells me they’re from Massachusetts, now I always ask what part,” I listened as McRae sang to the camera, delving into hyper specific details that remind her of someone from her past: pilgrim ashtrays, Christian Bale as Batman, video games. It’s a bittersweet tale of what remains long after a person has left your life, the little ways that they forever cement themselves in your mind. My fingers ran to Spotify, ready to update all my New England playlists, self-indulgently adding my new favourite track to ‘Hometown Blues’ between Gracie Abrams and Clairo. Unfortunately for me, however, the song was not yet released – and would not be for another six months.

“I was having a conversation with someone and they mentioned a video game and I had a brain blast,” McRae tells me many months later as we sit outside London’s Old St. Pancras Church, where she will later play her third and final headline show. “I was like, ‘why do I know what that is?’ I realised it was this video game that my ex played all the time and I would watch him watch video game walkthroughs of the game. I couldn’t believe I remembered that because it was almost a year after we’d broken up.”

“The next day I was sitting at the piano and I was like, ‘what are the other weird things that I remember?’ I started writing this thing and it felt very silly.” Silly or not, the song quickly gained the attention of hundreds of thousands of listeners, including Justin Bieber. “At that point, I had been posting stuff on Instagram truly almost every single day, but no one really cared. So when this took off I was really shocked. It wasn’t finished. I had written just the verse and the chorus, and then over the course of the next few weeks, in various different rooms, I finished it.”

“I’m very grateful that it’s resonating with people,” she continues, noting the surprising relatability of the song despite its perhaps unrelatable details (I personally do not have any exes with pilgrim ashrays). It’s a tool she picked up from Alabama Shakes’ “Miss You,” a song she loved back in college, during her formative years at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. “The first line is ‘I’m gonna miss you and your Mickey Mouse tattoo and you were living in your Honda Accord.’ I loved that song in college so much despite none of that being relevant to me. I feel like this song is in that same market. It’s this hyper specific thing and maybe the individual details mean nothing to you, but the specificity feels real anyway.”

Growing up, McRae always knew what she wanted to do with her life: “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think about wanting to be an artist. I didn’t realise how rare it was until I got older – I talk to people now and there’s the stereotypical quarter life crisis of people in their early twenties being like, ‘I don’t know what to do with my life.’ I’ve never thought about it even once.”

Now, with a degree in Popular Music from the Thornton School of Music, a successful debut album under her belt, and months spent on the road with some of the biggest artists of the decade – including some fellow USC alumni – it’s safe to say she’s living her childhood dreams. “I’m one of the oldest MUNA fans,” she declares proudly. “They went to USC as well, and in January of 2016, one of their songs got on a BuzzFeed listicle and I was like, ‘oh my God, people from USC are on BuzzFeed. They’re literally famous.’ And I became obsessed with them. So, obviously when I opened for them, I was a mess.” She followed that with a slot on Noah Kahan’s The Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever) Tour, where she played her first arena.

Between getting to sing Phoebe Bridgers’ verse on “Silk Chiffon” and hearing Noah Kahan’s voice singing the words to “Massachusetts” alongside her on stage, she has had some pretty pinch-me, y/n moments. But one of the most career-changing collaborations came from the studio, in the early days of working on her debut album with Grammy award-winning record producer Rahki (Kendrick Lamar, Jorja Smith).

“Massachusetts” arrives two years after McRae’s 2022 debut album, Are You Happy Now? — a coming-of-age project full of identity-searching and sonic exploration. Featuring her first single “White Boy” alongside the likes of fan-favourites “My Ego Dies At The End” and “Wolves,” the record pulls from the genres of folk, pop, and country, blending sad ballads and big sweeping anthems with clever lyricism and a classic singer-songwriter authenticity. The result is a clear sonic identity that lays the groundwork for what will no doubt be a long career ahead, with a mission statement she credits to her collaborative partnership with Rahki – who, throughout the process of producing the album, helped her develop a working, evolving thesis to arguably the most important question: what does it mean to sound like Jensen McRae?

“I brought in a lot of references when we were working on it and as I was getting mixes back, I was so caught up in wanting to sound like all the music that I love, to the detriment of me trying to carve out my own sound. I was like, ‘this does not sound like Phoebe Bridgers!’ The whole process of us making that first album was trying to figure out what it means for something to sound like Jensen McRae.”

“What comes next is not going to sound identical to that, but the first album is such an important foundation and so vital to understanding how I’ve become the artist that I am now. In making that first album, I really started to put more of a premium on my own individual identity, which is funny to me because I always grew up feeling like a bit of an outcast and feeling set apart from other people and not feeling like I sounded or looked or acted like other people. I think a part of me was always hopeful that there was a way that I could sneak in and blend into a group somehow, and working with Rahki just totally disabused me of that notion. He was like, ‘you have to commit to you.’ It was a road that’s hard to walk at 21, which is when I was making the first one.”

And who knows who they are at 21? “That’s what so much of the album is about,” she explains. “ Hearing those songs and knowing that was what I was going to be putting out into the world, I was like, ‘yes, this is exactly what I want to be happening. This is exactly how this was supposed to sound.’ I’m still so proud of that album and I’m so excited to keep discovering more about what it means to sound like me.”

One of McRae’s signature writing techniques – something she has come to be known for – is the extended metaphor, a tool she picked up in a songwriting class at USC and utilises frequently across the album on songs such as ‘Wolves’ (which references the Little Red Riding Hood story) and ‘God Has A Hitman’ (which pulls from religious and action movie imagery). “When I stumble across an image that feels resonant, I like teasing out all of the related words and related images that go along with it in service of telling a story. When I land on a perfect metaphor or perfect analogy, simile, whatever it is, and play with that, that’s something I really enjoy doing – thinking ‘what’s the cleverest thing that I can come up with?’ ‘What would be the most unexpected turn of phrase that I could still make feel relevant here?’”

Typically, she’ll bring these ideas into a writing session and turn them into magic. “I think the most important thing for any creative person is to know your strengths and weaknesses. I know I’m an excellent lyricist. I know that that’s my biggest strength. I know I’m competent at writing melodies. I know I’m not as good at writing instrumental parts. And I know I’m a good arranger, but I’m not a good engineer. And so all of these things are things I take with me into a session.” Leading with both confidence and humility, she is able to stand her ground on certain decisions, while deferring to collaborators for others. “The most important thing, though, is that they’re just really nice and warm and hospitable and create an environment that’s fertile for creativity.”

The aforementioned “Wolves” is a track McRae is especially proud of, particularly for the way it has resonated with her growing community of fans. “A lot of people have shared stories with me that are very, very heavy and traumatising after hearing ‘Wolves’ and I’m grateful that it could provide any healing or catharsis for anyone,” she tells me. I question if she’s ever felt nervous about that responsibility and she shakes her head. “I feel like all my fans can recognise that my music is speaking to them and for them and through them and that the access that they have to me is through that. I want my music to soundtrack all of those conversations and be a stepping stone for you to have those conversations with the people in your life who know you best and who can actually take care of you.”

This relationship with her fans has never been clearer than at her shows. Even when opening for Noah Kahan and MUNA, she spots them in the crowd, singing every word to her sometimes yet-to-be-released hits. “It was most astonishing before ‘Massachusetts’ came out. I was opening for Noah Kahan in late March and early April and I would always play ‘Massachusetts’ last and I would get on stage and start introducing it and there would be this huge reaction — way bigger than the reaction to all my previous songs — and as an opener, having that reaction to a song that’s not out is very jarring and very humbling and very, very moving. It always brought me to the brink of tears.”

“It forces me to get out of my comfort zone a little bit,” she admits when I ask about adjusting to the touring lifestyle. “So much of being a musician is super social, which honestly I don’t thrive in necessarily.” But on stage, the self-described introvert appears naturally captivating, a picture of authentic confidence. Balancing anecdotal stories with jaw-dropping vocal belts, she connects with the audience in a multi-faceted manner – her easy-to-love humour shining through with the familiarity of an old friend; her profound lyrics speaking like omens, capturing the emotions you didn’t know anyone had the words for.

For herself, these on-stage emotions require a version of method acting that can be surprisingly difficult to shake. “In service of a great performance, I am spending so much time in a now ancient headspace,” she reflects, explaining that putting herself back into the mindset she was in when she wrote songs can make it difficult to decipher past from present. “It feels very present, it feels very real, especially when I’m playing songs for an audience and for those people they’re hearing it for the first time and it’s reflecting the present life experiences that they’re going through. I have to remind myself that I already experienced this and processed it and moved past it – and that’s why it’s in a song.”

“Learning how to do the emotional labour of being a musician is something that I don’t think you can really learn when you’re in school,” she continues, summing up the challenges she’s dealt with (with grace, might I add) since graduating from USC and working as a touring artist. “But I absolutely love being on stage, I absolutely love getting to play with my little brother (Holden McRae – a solo musician himself who also tours as Jensen’s pianist), I absolutely love getting to see new cities — there’s so much of it to love. And similarly to how I’ve been very lucky with fans, every headliner that I’ve ever opened for has been incredible, so kind, so generous. They’ve made it really easy for me to slot right in.”

“Getting to play arenas – getting to open for Noah in arenas – that’s not something I envisioned, but it was always something I wanted. Walking onto the arena stage for the first time in soundcheck, it just looked so big. I was like, ‘this is what I’ve been preparing for for my whole life.’”

While this dream may have already come true, the future is just beginning for Jensen McRae. Headline shows selling out here and there, a forthcoming novel, tentative aspirations to form a supergroup with her brother, and perhaps a move to London (“it’s the only other place I have ever thought about living other than LA”), there is much to anticipate. But if waiting six months for the release of “Massachusetts” taught me anything, it’s that good things take time. And McRae has all the time in the world.

Jensen McRae has just announced two headline shows in partnership with Vote Save America, on 15 October at El Cid in Los Angeles and on 22 October at Slipper Room in New York. Tickets go on sale tomorrow at 9am local time. Click here for more information.