Jensen McRae will soon be stepping onto Australian stages for the very first time, arriving at Laneway as one of indie-folk music’s most emotional new voices.
Known for her razor-sharp lyricism and diaristic storytelling, the LA-based songwriter has built a reputation for songs that feel intensely personal yet relatable – evidenced more than ever on her most recent album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!.
Released last year, the album moves through love, heartbreak, and more, with wit and vulnerability. Widely praised for its clarity and emotional intelligence, it landed on several year-end ‘Best Of’ lists and marked a significant leap forward from her acclaimed debut.
Written after two formative relationships in her early twenties, the album found McRae grappling with the inescapability of pain and memory – the idea that no matter how far you run, your inner life eventually catches up with you. It’s embedded with self-awareness, offering listeners permission to sit with big, messy feelings rather than tidy conclusions.
And as she explains, that’s the thesis of her music: don’t be ashamed to feel the big feelings.
Rolling Stone AU/NZ: You’re bringing your music to Australian audiences for the first time – how are you feeling stepping into these shows?
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Jensen McRae: I’m super excited about it. I have friends from Australia and New Zealand, and I have just heard such great things, and I just can’t wait to collect some data, see what it’s like playing there versus playing in the US or Canada or the UK. I’m excited to finally be able to put faces to all these comments and DMs I’ve been getting asking me to come down under.
Do you approach festival sets differently from your headline shows? Is there added pressure at a festival?
I don’t know that it adds extra pressure, but you do have to have a different mindset going into it. It gives you a little bit of an extra challenge of ‘how am I going to create a moment that’s going to stick’ with these people that maybe have never heard of you or they maybe know one song and they haven’t decided whether or not they’re going to be committed to you as a fan?
Obviously at a headline show, people know almost all, if not all of the music, and they’re there because they want to be. Whereas at a festival, maybe they’re just camping out for Chappell Roan, you know? I feel like if you like her music, there’s something in my music that you will find that you also love. And it’s exciting to try to figure out, ‘how am I going to break through to these people who haven’t met me yet’?
You mentioned Chappell, is that who you’re most excited to see play? Anyone else on the Laneway lineup that’s caught your eye?
Chappell’s definitely up there. I’m a huge, huge fan of hers, have been for years. I’m really excited to see Lucy [Dacus] and Gigi [Perez] and Role Model. But really, everyone on there, it’s such a stacked lineup, I’m so lucky to be a part of it.
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Australian crowds tend to be very emotionally present. What do you hope people connect with most when they see you live?
I don’t know that there’s anything specific, I think more than anything, I’m excited to see what they pick as their favourites of my music, because every show is so different. There’s certain songs that kind of consistently resonate with people, but then every show will also have their standout thing that I didn’t notice being a fan favourite on any other show. So I’m very curious as to what songs that I play are going to particularly resonate with these crowds.
Is there one that comes to mind that you think the crowd will love in particular?
I feel like “Let Me Be Wrong” is one of my really, really fun ones. And I feel like that’s really suited to a festival dynamic. And also, I do drop a little f-bomb in that one, and I feel like the Australians are really good at swearing, so I feel like they’re going to have a lot of fun with that.
Now, your new album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, has been out for about 8 months or so now, right. Tell me a bit about that, how has the reception been?
I’ve been really, really pleased and humbled by the response. The initial outpouring was really wonderful, but then I had this kind of renewed feeling of gratitude at the end of the year with a few ‘Best Of’ lists, which I kind of forgot about. I’m a person who definitely loves gold stars and praise and approval, I was a real teacher’s pet as a kid, but I definitely was not thinking about that for whatever reason. Like, I didn’t remember that there was a possibility that the album would be recognised in that way. So that was really, really cool to have happen as a button to a great year of touring.
It moves through the topics of love, criticism, heartbreak, so beautifully… Is there anything that this record allowed you to say or explore that you hadn’t before?
When I made my first album, I’d never been in a relationship before. And so the few love songs that are on that album are all about yearning and they’re all hypothetical and they’re not really rooted in reality. And then between writing the first one and writing the second one, I went through two breakups and I felt like that experience unsurprisingly profoundly changed me.
To have two long relationships back to back in your early to mid twenties, it’s a very formative time so it was really interesting to be able to write about these topics I’d heard in so many songs by so many artists for so many years, that I never fully could sink my teeth into. And now it’s like, ‘Oh, now I really have something to say, now I really have a way to add to this conversation’. Obviously, everyone’s got their breakup album, everyone’s done it, that’s not new. But I was really excited to think, ‘what’s the Jensen McRae version of this?’, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
If you could sum up the ‘Jensen McRae version’ in one sentence, what would it be?
My instinct is the album title, which is I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, you can’t outrun your demons, no matter what you do, no matter where you travel to or how much you try to bury it under, the pain and the trauma that you’ve experienced is always going to catch up to you.
There’s a strong feeling in your music of wanting to be seen – and of helping others feel seen too. Do you hear from fans who say your songs articulate things they couldn’t say themselves? Are there certain things they’ve pointed out that you didn’t expect?
That’s an interesting question. I feel like “Massachusetts” was the song, interestingly, that people kept pointing to as the thing that really spoke to them and was the most relatable to them, which was baffling to me because it was the song that had the most specific detail about one very specific person. So I was totally floored that so many people were like, ‘this totally describes my ex, this totally describes an ex-friend’. There’s so many people who were relating to it. And the really funny thing was how many men were like, ‘man, you really get boys’, and I’m like ‘I guess!’.
This is about one boy and I’m glad that it’s universally applicable in this way. Interestingly, I guess because the thing about “Massachusetts” is even if your ex is not from Massachusetts, even if these particular signposts are not literally meaningful, they’re super symbolically meaningful in the sense that everyone who’s been through any kind of heartbreak or abandonment of any kind, there’s pieces of the person that they leave behind. And that feeling of constantly finding those pieces and being caught by surprise by them, that is a thing that everyone feels that they can relate to.
You’ve spoken openly about existing as a Black Jewish woman in a genre that doesn’t always make space for artists who look like you. How has that experience shaped both your songwriting and your sense of purpose as an artist?
It affected the way I present myself, in that I just feel like I have to be a lot more conscious about my presentation and about being a role model. Being a role model is something that’s really important to me, and I feel like Black women in particular don’t get a lot of chances. Our mistakes are scrutinised much more heavily and we’re much more quick to be boxed in and categorised in certain ways based on choices that we make, that may not be representative of who we are fully as a person. So I know that I have to be very conscious.
The fact of the matter is I’m a big dork, like I’m a very academically inclined person, I’m a very literate person, my interests do tend towards being things that like parents would be like, ‘I wish my kid was like this’. So in the moments where I maybe don’t feel like a role model or I don’t feel like I’m living up to my potential, I’m like, ‘well, I have to be careful about how I present that and how I package that because I want to make sure that I am, I continue to be taken seriously for as long as I want to be taken seriously’. And I want to make sure that kids feel like they can look up to me, I want parents to be like happy that their kids are going to my shows.
In terms of my songwriting, I feel like it’s not so much a specific thing that has to do with my heritage, but just being any kind of outsider in any way, whether that’s being a racial minority or religious minority, being in the LGBTQIA+ community, being disabled, there’s so many things that will other you from people. And anyone who’s been othered in any way, if they become a writer, it just makes them into a real observer of other people because you feel on the outside of the rooms that you’re in a lot. Being on the outside gives you the opportunity, the time and the space to pay attention to what other people are doing and pick up things and record things about human behaviour.
I don’t know what kind of a writer I would be if I fit more like conventional standards, if I was more acceptable to certain rooms and certain kinds of groups of people. But I do feel like being an othered person in so many ways has enabled me to be a better writer because I have more time to pay attention because sometimes people are not paying any attention to me.
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Who are your biggest influences, are there any other artists that you look up to, anyone from a songwriting perspective?
From a songwriting perspective, there’s so many writers that I admire, not even people that are necessarily much older than me. I’m a huge Samia fan, I think she’s an incredible writer. I’m a huge Katie Gavin fan, one of my favourite songwriters. Justin Vernon is like probably my biggest songwriting hero, and I just really admire him as a person as well. I’ve gotten to know him a little bit in the last couple of years. I was a super fan of his since I was a teenager, and in getting to have conversations with him, about music and about my career and all these things, I just really admire how much of a real person he is.
It’s very easy when you become that successful to become totally detached from reality and to have an ego, and he is just none of that. I really hope that one, I’m lucky enough to have a career even a fraction of as successful as his has been, and two, to maintain that kind of groundedness. I don’t really worry about myself in that way at all, I’m very close to my family and I don’t choose my friends based on anything shallow or superficial. All the people that I surround myself with are people that I feel most connected to creatively and spiritually. I like that even on the rare moments where I do have an ego that everyone I love gives me a real reality check.
What about Australian artists, any that you’re loving at the moment?
I’m biased because she’s a very dear friend of mine, but Gretta Ray is just the best. I’m obsessed with her. In addition to being obscenely talented, she’s also just so sweet, and so kind, and such a good friend. She and I haven’t even gotten to spend that much time together, but when we do spend time together and I hear the way that she talks about her other friends… if you are lucky enough to have a person like Gretta in your life, you are so fortunate. And I hope that her fans know that, they stan a good woman.
How does she inspire you?
Honestly, just her positivity. She has this infectious positivity and she just has this brightness. Even when she goes through difficult things, she is so perseverant and so optimistic. I feel like every time I have a conversation with her, even if we’re talking about our problems, there’s this understanding that everything’s actually going to be fine. And that’s so important to have, especially in an industry like this, where there’s a lot of obstacles. It’s not easy to get a music career off the ground and to maintain one, and it can be really easy to be pessimistic and to compare yourself to other people. So I’m really grateful to have people like Gretta and Maisie Peters and all these wonderful songwriters who I’ve come to know and love who I don’t feel like I’m in competition with at all. We’re just supporting each other and love each other so much. And that is an attitude that I want to make sure that I inspire in other people too, I really would hate for any women to feel like we’re at all in competition with each other ever. Music is such a wide, broad field and there’s really truly room for all of us to shine.
So what are you most looking forward to when you get to Australia? Anything on your bucket list?
I’m really excited to see some beautiful nature. I love being outside and I love going on long walks and going on hikes, and I know that there’s going to be ample opportunity to do all of those things. I’m excited to see some new scenery.
If there’s one thing fans can take away from your Laneway set, what would it be?
I think I just want everyone to feel like they have permission to feel big feelings. That’s the thesis statement of my music generally, I don’t want people to be ashamed. I don’t want people to think that they’re cringe. I want to abolish cringe. I want people to feel whatever they’re doing in complete earnestness, which is totally valid and legitimate and encouraged at a Jensen McRae show.
For more information about Laneway, see here.
LANEWAY FESTIVAL 2026
Thursday, February 5th (18+)
Western Springs, Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau NZ
Saturday, February 7th (16+)
Southport Sharks, Gold Coast/Yugambeh Jagun QLD
Sunday, February 8th (16+)
Centennial Park, Sydney/Gadigal & Bidjigal NSW
Friday, February 13th (16+)
Flemington Park, Melbourne/Wurundjeri Biik VIC
Saturday, February 14th (16+)
Adelaide Showgrounds, Adelaide/Kaurna Yerta SA
Sunday, February 15th (16+)
Arena Joondalup, Perth/Whadjuk Boodjar WA
