Entertainment
How Jensen McRae became L.A.'s next great songwriter
Jensen McRae is still chewing over something her therapist told her during their first session together.
“I was talking about how sensitive I am and how I was feeling all these feelings,” the 27-year-old singer and songwriter recalls, “and she was like, ‘You have yet to describe a feeling to me — everything you’ve described is a thought.’” McRae’s eyes widen behind her stylish glasses. “That destroyed me. She said, ‘Feelings are in your body. Thoughts are in your head.’
“This was like six years ago, and I think about it constantly.”
A proudly bookish Los Angeles native whose academic ambitions took her to the competitive Harvard-Westlake School, McRae wrote her first song at around age 8; by the time she was a teenager, music had become her way to cope with the cruelty of the world. Yet when she looks back at the stuff she wrote when she was younger, what strikes her isn’t that it was too raw — it’s that it wasn’t raw enough.
“I think I was trying to intellectualize my feelings to get away from being vulnerable,” she says. “Now I know there’s room for both — there’s a way to be intellectually rigorous about my sensitivity.”
Indeed there is, as McRae demonstrates on her knockout of a sophomore album, “I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!” Released in April by the respected indie label Dead Oceans (whose other acts include Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers), the LP documents the dissolution of two romantic relationships in gleaming acoustic pop songs that use gut-punch emotional detail to ponder complicated ideas of gender, privilege and abuse.
In “Massachusetts,” a snippet of which blew up when she posted it on TikTok in 2023, she captures the private universe she shared with an ex, while “Let Me Be Wrong” thrums with an overachiever’s desperation: “Something twisted in my chest says I’m good but not the best,” she sings, the rhyme so neat that you can almost see her awaiting the listener’s approving nod.
“I Can Change Him” is an unsparing account of the narrator’s savior complex that McRae was tempted to leave off the album until her team convinced her otherwise. “I think of myself as an evolved and self-actualized woman,” she says with a laugh. “So the admission that I thought it would be my love that transforms this person — I mean, it’s super embarrassing.” Then there’s “Savannah,” which lays out the lasting damage left behind after a breakup, and the chilling “Daffodils,” in which McRae sings about a guy who “steals base while I sleep.”
McRae’s songs don’t flinch from trauma, but they can also be very funny. “I’d like to blame the drugs,” she sings, longing for toxic old comforts in a song called “I Don’t Do Drugs.” And here’s how she brings the guy in “I Can Change Him” to life in just a few lines:
Same old eight-dollar cologne
Same old he can’t be alone
Same old cigarettes he rolls
Same old Cozmo’s “Plastic Soul”
Asked whether she’d rather make someone laugh or cry, McRae needs no time to think. “I’m always proud when I make someone cry,” she says as she sits on a park bench in Silver Lake on a recent afternoon. “But more important to me than being the sad girl is that I’m funny — that’s way more important to my identity.” She smiles.
“I’ve definitely made dark jokes where people are like, ‘That’s horrible that you think you can joke about that,’” she says. “I’m like, ‘It’s my thing — the sad thing happened to me.’”
McRae’s music has attracted some famous fans. In 2024 she opened for Noah Kahan on tour, and she recently jammed with Justin Bieber at his place after the former teen idol reached out on Instagram with kind words about “Massachusetts.” Last month, McRae — a graduate of USC’s Thornton School of Music — played a pair of packed hometown shows at the El Rey where she introduced “Savannah” by telling the crowd, “You are not defined by the worst thing that ever happened to you.”
“Jensen is extremely … if I say the word ‘gifted,’ you’ll be like, ‘okay’ — but she truly is a gifted individual,” says Patrice Rushen, the veteran jazz and R&B musician who mentored McRae as chair of the Thornton School’s popular music program. (Among the classics McRae learned to perform during her studies was Rushen’s 1982 “Forget Me Nots.”) Rushen praises the depth and precision of McRae’s songwriting — “her ability to see beyond what’s right in front of her and to find just the right word or texture in her storytelling.”
“I adored her as a student,” Rushen adds.
McRae was born in Santa Monica and grew up in Woodland Hills in a tight-knit family; her dad is Black and her mom is Jewish, and she has two brothers — the older of whom is her business manager, the younger of whom plays keyboard in her road band.
The singer describes herself as both a goody two-shoes and a teacher’s pet, which she affectionately blames on her father, a lawyer who went to UCLA and Harvard Law School. “He was born in 1965 — his birth certificate says ‘Negro’ on it, which is crazy,” she says. “His whole life, it was: ‘You have to be twice as good to get half as far.’ And even though I was born in the ’90s, that was still kind of instilled in us.
“Especially being at Harvard-Westlake,” she adds. “I was one of the few Black kids, and I didn’t want to be underestimated. Now, I find being underestimated kind of funny because I have so much confidence in my own ability that when someone thinks I’m not gifted in whatever way, I’m like, ‘Oh, you’ll find out you’re wrong soon enough.’”
McRae studied songwriting at USC’s Thornton School of Music.
(Michael Rowe / For The Times)
Having absorbed the songwriting fundamentals of James Taylor, Sara Bareilles and Taylor Swift, McRae entered USC in 2015 and played her first gig — “the first one that wasn’t a school talent show,” she clarifies — at L.A.’s Hotel Cafe after her freshman year.
“I don’t know if my mom knows this, but I told her not to come,” she recalls with a laugh. “I was like, ‘I’m 18 — I’m grown up now — and I’m gonna be hanging with all these cool people.’” In fact, her audience that night consisted of only the bartender and the other acts on the bill.
Her creative breakthrough came when she wrote her song “White Boy” when she was 20. It’s about feeling invisible, and McRae knew she’d achieved something because “when I finished it, I was like, ‘I can never play this in front of anyone.’” A few years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, she fired off a jokey tweet imagining that Bridgers would soon write a song about “hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at dodger stadium”; the post went viral, racking up shares from thousands of people, including Bridgers.
“I had to put my phone in a drawer because it was buzzing so much,” says McRae, who ended up writing the song herself and calling it “Immune.”
For “I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!” — the title borrows a line of dialogue from “Back to the Future” — McRae sought a lusher sound than she got on her folky 2022 debut; she recorded the album in North Carolina with the producer Brad Cook, who’s also worked with Bon Iver and Waxahatchee and who helped fill out the songs with appealing traces of turn-of-the-millennium pop by Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson.
As a singer, McRae can expertly control the sob in her voice, as in “Tuesday,” a stark piano ballad about a betrayal made all the more painful by how little it meant to the traitor. At the El Rey, McRae doubled down on that theme in a florid yet intimate rendition of “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” the Mike Reid/Allen Shamblin tune that Bonnie Raitt turned into one of pop’s greatest anthems of dejection.
What did McRae learn about songwriting at USC? She mentions a technique called “toggling,” which one professor illustrated using John Mayer’s “Why Georgia.”
“The first line is, ‘I’m driving up ’85 in the kind of morning that lasts all afternoon,’” McRae says. “That’s a description of the outside world. Then the next line is, ‘I’m just stuck inside the gloom,’ toggling back to the internal emotion. That’s something I pay attention to now. If I’m writing a verse, I’ll do scene-setting, scene-setting, scene-setting, then how do I feel about it?”
McRae is particularly good at dropping the listener into a scenario, as in “Savannah,” which starts: “There is an intersection in your college town with your name on it.” To get to that kind of intriguing specificity, she’ll sometimes write six or eight lines of a verse, to discard the first few — “Those are often just filler words,” she says — and “rearrange the rest so that whatever I had at the end goes at the top. Now I have to beat that.”
For all her craft, McRae knows that songwriting is just one of the skills required of any aspiring pop star. She loves performing on the road, though touring has become “physically punishing,” as she puts it, since she was diagnosed a few years ago with a thyroid condition and chronic hives, both of which have led to a severely restricted diet. She recently posted a TikTok in which she detailed her regimen of medications — one attempt, she says, to bring some visibility to the topic of chronic illness. (That said, McRae admits to being unsettled by the DM she received the other day from a fan who recognized her at her allergist’s office: “They’re like, ‘Hey, I saw you — I was going in to get my shots too.’”)
McRae views social media more broadly as “a factory that I clock into and clock out of.” She’s well aware that it’s what enabled her to start building an audience. And she’s hardly anti-phone. “I love being on my phone,” she says. “I literally was born in the right generation. But when it comes to constantly looking at images of myself, that’s my business card or my portfolio — it’s not actually me, the human being.”
In January, she deleted TikTok during the brief outage related to President Trump’s ban of the app. “Then, of course, it came back right away, but I couldn’t re-download it. So for a month I didn’t have TikTok. As it turns out, I was fine.”
Arguably better?
“Probably, yeah. I’m back on it now, obviously, because I have to do promo. At first I thought it was the loudest, most overstimulating thing in the world — I couldn’t believe I used it. Then after a week, I was like, oh yeah, no, I’m reacclimated.”
Let’s just say that the wedding band has never occupied the most exalted rung of the ladder in music.
Playing “September” and “Celebration” is often what’s most required. As one member of the Bride and the Groove, the band at the center of John Carney’s new film, puts it: They’re not rock stars. They’re human jukeboxes.
But in “Power Ballad,” a wedding band singer and pop star cross paths. For one night, all of the stratification of the music world falls away. “Power Ballad” starts like a fairy tale.
Since 2007’s “Once,” the Irish writer-director has focused his films on the redemptive capacity of music. Carney, who was once a bassist for the Frames, knows from experience. From “Sing Street” to “Flora and Son,” he has made unabashedly earnest tales where a song, or just picking up an instrument, changes lives.
This can, undoubtedly, lead Carney into sentimental territory. Lucky for him, his chosen subject — music — is more worthy of sentiment than almost anything else. Yet the song doesn’t quite remain the same in “Power Ballad,” a movie that begins with the gentle sweetness Carney is known for, but detours into something more discordant.
Rick (Paul Rudd) is an American musician who gave up on his once-promising rock band’s future to instead live with his wife (Marcella Plunkett) and teenage daughter (a spunky, underused Beth Fallon) in Dublin. His former group was called Octagon, a perfect former band name if there ever were one.
But for years, Rick has fronted the Bride and the Groove. It’s an unromantic day job (or rather a night one) that hasn’t entirely sapped his belief in his own songwriting. During an encore at one wedding, he plays an original tune and is mentally transported to an arena full of swaying fans. When he snaps out of it, he’s staring at an empty dance floor and faces that say: That wasn’t Kool & the Gang.
At another wedding at at a castle, the band is asked to let a friend of the newlyweds sit in. They reluctantly agree, and are surprised to see the very popular boy band veteran, Danny (Nick Jonas), step on stage. He sings Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” and it’s great. Though Rick had just dismissed Danny’s music as “manufactured content for young, excitable teens,” he discovers Danny is a genuine musician.
But, later that night, something even more remarkable transpires. Rick bumps into Danny, and the two quickly hit it off. They begin jamming together and sharing songs that need work. They are both so jazzed by their unlikely collaboration that they play into the next morning.
The actual moment of artistic creation, and the craft it requires, is something the movies almost always skip over. But capturing collaborative juices flowing is exactly what Carney excels at. You can feel his joy in it. So it’s fitting that one of the unfinished songs Rick plays for Danny, “How to Write a Song (Without You),” is about creative invention.
It’s here when you wonder where “Power Ballad” is headed. Is this, for Rick, the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Will they turn into the next great songwriting duo, lifting Rick out of weddings and proving to the world that Danny is more than a boy-band pretty face?
That is very possibly the movie Carney might have made a decade ago. But “Power Ballad,” which he co-wrote with Peter McDonald (who also co-stars as a band member), shifts six months ahead in time. Rick is standing in a shopping mall when the familiar lyrics of “How to Write a Song” softly float through the stores. He stands dumbfounded in the gleaming halls of commerce, a befuddlement that slowly turns into outrage the bigger and bigger Danny’s smash hit grows.
“Power Ballad” loses some of its steam in its second half, which follows Rick’s struggle for justice. Making things considerably harder is that he can find no recorded demo of the song. His family and his band don’t even really believe him.
But even as the movie struggles to sustain its opening refrain, Carney’s film is always riffing on ideas of authenticity and aspiration in music. That Jonas is, himself, a former boy band star who has at times gone it alone, lends the movie a direct connection to contemporary music, where tussles over authorship are increasingly common.
Jonas has been good in other films (notably the “Jumanji” movies), but this is his most ambitious and convincing performance to date. It’s a testament to the movie that Danny’s theft isn’t a purely villainous act. He gives the song a bridge and the vocal power to take it to another level. He’s under mounting pressure from his label to deliver a hit. An executive (Jack Reynor) wants “Danny 2.0” but has little faith he can supply it.
But it’s an even more well-tailored role for Rudd. He memorably and very goofily played a bassist in the 2009 comedy “I Love You, Man.” But while he sings well, it’s not his musical chops that lift the performance. It’s more that Rick, a contented family man with unrealized rock-star dreams, gives the exceptionally genial Rudd more notes to play as an actor. Rudd makes for a very likeable everyman out to convince the world he is capable of a beautiful song.
And that’s the abiding belief of Carney’s. No matter all the struggles, the artistic injustices, the corporate hegemony, he still believes that if you make something truly soulful, it will break through. It will claw its way to the surface, and move people. It’s undoubtedly gotten harder since “Once,” this movie seems to admit. The world is against you. But what one person can offer, a ballad or otherwise, still has power. Fairy tale or not, that’s worth believing in.
“Power Ballad,” a Lionsgate release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language throughout and some drug use.” Running time: 108 minutes. Three stars out of four.
Entertainment
Review: Muscling past a flat script, a big-screen ‘Masters of the Universe’ embraces its own silliness
What will today’s kids think of He-Man, the muscle-bound ’80s relic with the most iconic bob after Anna Wintour? Launched in an era where machismo meant a goofy wrestler or metal singer with an eight-octave falsetto, the steroidal beskirted barbarian has always been a bit ridiculous. C’mon, his name is He-Man. What in the testosterone is that?
And so, director Travis Knight (“Bumblebee”) has made his reboot of “Masters of the Universe” a dopey, friendly comedy about modern masculinity in crisis with a He-Man who openly wonders what kind of a man to be. Hurtled out of the kingdom of Eternia as a boy, this Prince Adam (a terrifically game Nicholas Galitzine) came of age in Oklahoma City as a sweet guy who happens to be obsessed with swords. Instead of transforming into the strongest man in the galaxy to protect his throne from the evil duo of Skeletor (voiced by Jared Leto) and Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie), earthbound Adam parries HR complaints while sitting behind a desk plate that labels his gender identity not as He-Man but He/Him.
Times have changed. Even He-Man’s talking pet tiger (Tom Wilton) asks for consent before giving him a lick.
Galitzine’s He-Man is more Clark Kent than Superman, a gentle, funny, under-estimated dweeb. On a blind date, his descriptions of magical griffins and burning deserts sound humiliatingly immature. Dumped before dessert, he sulks home where his bro-y roommate (Christian Vunipola) secretly watches the weepie “The Notebook” when no one is looking as the soundtrack spins an acoustic cover of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” Every man in this movie has a public persona and a private one. Even Adam’s irritable female boss, Suzie (Sasheer Zamata), hides under a people-pleasing mask. “This is my mega-serious face,” she says with an unnerving grin.
The performances are good; the plot, postcard-sized: Adam returns to Eternia, unleashes his alter-identity He-Man and wrestles with the pressure to live up to his new biceps. Although Adam must rescue his royal parents (James Purefoy and Charlotte Riley) from Skeletor, he reaches for empathy before a blade. Could Skeletor really be that bad, he asks his childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes). “He has a skull for a face,” Teela insists. In this world, everyone’s measured against their looks.
Here’s another question: Could Skeletor really be Jared Leto? Physically, of course not. Skeletor is all pixels with a clattering jaw perfect for chewing the scenery. (The bully is especially hilarious when the story transplants him to an ordinary weight-lifting gym — call him Skele-Chad.) Leto’s grumbling Brit-inflected baritone is an unrecognizable concoction of trilled r’s and plummy vowels — and the best performance he’s done in years. With apologies to Bette Midler, you should hear the gravitas Leto brings to calling his minions “the buttworms beneath my feet.”
Yes, that’s the humor level of the dialogue. Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee and Dave Callaham have written a heavy-handed script in which, when Castle Grayskull comes under attack, Idris Elba’s soldier is forced to yell, “We’re under attack!” You know, in case the exploding laser beams weren’t obvious.
Obviousness is this film’s handicap — and the main joke. In this movie’s lore, juvenile Adam, played by an adorable Artie Wilkinson-Hunt, is the guilty child who invented his meathead He-Man moniker, as well the nicknames of his allies Ram-Man, Mekaneck and Fisto, who all look exactly as they sound to their chagrin. “I don’t fist anyone,” Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) protests. The grown-ups in the audience snicker.
Knight was a kid himself when the cartoon version of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” debuted on television. As with his “Transformers” spin-off “Bumblebee,” he makes movies like a child who loves taking his action figures out of the box and giving them a silly soul.
He’s no hack: Knight’s debut film, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” was nominated for an Academy Award for animation. Raised with an affection for brands (his father, Phil Knight, is the co-founder of Nike), he also feels obliged to include so much fan service for his generation that kids will have to swashbuckle through confusing callbacks to discover He-Man for themselves. One battle scene is scored to 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” simply as a nod to a He-Man mash-up video that went viral back in 2005, a clash as wonky as it sounds. Yet Daniel Pemberton’s opening theme music is a rousing crescendo of stadium rock synthesizers. You can hear Queen guitarist Brian May in the score — not merely as an influence. It’s actually him.
Culturally, hyper-machismo has oscillated from cool to lame to ironically cool and back again for decades. Even Queen itself was deemed lame until “Wayne’s World” resurrected “Bohemian Rhapsody” as headbanging slapstick. If you spot a guy swaggering like a brute from Eternia on the sidewalk, masked or not, he probably thinks he’s more awesome than everyone else does. Likewise, when He-Man smashes skulls to a wailing metal soundtrack, I no longer know if I’m meant to be snickering with the electric guitars or at them. Neither does the movie, which seems to decide each scene’s individual tone on a coin flip.
Frankly, the dorky version of Adam is more fun than the heroic He-Man, even with Knight hammering us every minute to laugh that he’s a total weakling. Galitzine embraces the indignity. Zooming through the air in a flying Sky-Sled, he wedges his face into a triple chin. Dazed and enthusiastic, Galitzine’s human charm counterbalances Eternia’s synthetic feel, a blandscape of bright forests and cliffside dungeons that looks dated — not to 1983 but to last decade’s greenscreen-heavy would-be fantasy franchises like “Clash of the Titans” and “John Carter.”
Please don’t make Galitzine do five of these movies, even though he’s very good. An unusually pretty leading man who is quirkier and funnier than he looks, Galitzine is the kind of rising talent Hollywood rarely knows how to handle. In his previous roles, he gave off the impression of being flummoxed by his own attractiveness, whether as a queer prince (“Red, White & Royal Blue”), a Harry Styles-esque pop star (“The Idea of You”) or a popular football jock whose high school classmates are oblivious that he has the IQ of a second-grader (“Bottoms”). Here, Galitzine multiplies that self-conscious gag times a thousand, visibly dazzled by his own six-pack when he transforms from himbo to gym-bro. Even Skeletor is agog over the “big long sword dangling between his thighs.”
Smartly cast, Galitzine could prove to have the potential of Brad Pitt, another blond hunk who longed to get weird, chafing against roles that made him take off his shirt until he hit 55 and realized it was a flex. But shouldering a wobbly, expensive summer tentpole is a risk — just ask Sam Worthington or Taylor Kitsch. If “Masters of the Universe” tanks, here’s hoping Galitzine summons the strength to dig himself out of the rubble.
‘Masters of the Universe’
Rated: PG-13, for sequences of violence/action, some suggestive material, and language
Running time: 2 hours, 21 minutes
Playing: Opening Friday, June 5 in wide release
NEW YORK (OSV News) – As America’s Catholic bishops prepare to mark the semiquincentennial by consecrating the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a French docudrama that can aid viewers in understanding the full significance of such an action makes its timely appearance.
A Fathom Entertainment presentation, “Sacred Heart: His Reign Has No End” will have a limited theatrical run June 9-11 and June 14. The version screening on June 10 will be dubbed in Spanish.
Following its initial release in France last fall, the film proved to be phenomenally popular, with ticket sales reaching the half-million mark in a country usually regarded as deeply secular. This unusual development clearly indicates that the movie resonated with audiences in a way that even its creators may not have expected.
Filmmakers Sabrina and Steven J. Gunnell examine the origins, meaning and enduring relevance of devotion to the Sacred Heart. They begin their exploration even before the landmark revelations received in the 1670s by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Burgundian Visitation nun, showing that earlier saints had focused on the subject in medieval times.
Using reenactments, interviews and archival images, the Gunnells also highlight the theological connection between the Sacred Heart and the Eucharist. This is done, in part, by recounting a few of the many Eucharistic miracles granted to the Church over the centuries.
By profiling contemporary devotees of the Sacred Heart, including formerly inactive Catholics, the picture demonstrates the impact the insights given to St. Margaret Mary continue to have on the lives of people around the world. Locations visited range from the gang-infested streets of a Parisian suburb to the once war-torn Central American country of El Salvador.
An excellent and enjoyable catechetical resource, the feature is also both moving and uplifting. It can be recommended for all but the youngest kids.
For theater locations and showtimes, go to: sacredheartfilm.us
Dubbed into English.
The film contains gory images of the Crucifixion. The OSV News classification is A-II — adults and adolescents. Not rated by the Motion Picture Association.
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