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.”
Entertainment
Lawsuit claims Riley Keough is biological parent of John Travolta and Kelly Preston’s youngest child
New documents in a lawsuit against Priscilla Presley’s son include claims that Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keough is the biological parent of John Travolta and the late Kelly Preston’s youngest child, Benjamin.
Priscilla Presley’s former business partner Brigitte Kruse and associate Kevin Fialko filed an amended complaint against Navarone Garcia in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday. Included in the allegations are claims that the “Daisy Jones & the Six” actor, daughter of the late Lisa Marie Presley, gave her eggs to Travolta and Preston in exchange for “an old Jaguar” and “between $10,000 – $20,000.”
According to the complaint, “the entire Presley family clamored for control of the estate and for pay-outs” immediately after Lisa Marie Presley’s death in 2023. Among those who allegedly approached Kruse was Lisa Marie’s ex-husband Michael Lockwood, with whom she shared twin daughters Harper and Finley Lockwood. Kruse and Fialko were allegedly tasked with acting as negotiators and mediators amid the “family chaos.”
The document details how Lockwood said Travolta and Preston had “previously used Lisa Marie’s eggs to get pregnant” because Preston “had been unable to bear her own children.” It was unclear whether Presley’s eggs produced a child. Preston died in 2020 at age 57 after a two-year battle with breast cancer.
Lockwood also allegedly said the couple had approached the Presley family again “in or around 2010” but Travolta “no longer wanted to use Lisa Marie’s eggs because they did not want ‘eggs with heroin’ on them.” According to the filing, a deal was “orchestrated” in which “Riley Keough gave her eggs to Travolta so that Kelly could give birth to their son, Ben Travolta” and “Riley was given an old Jaguar and paid between $10,000 – $20,000 for the deal.”
Included in the filing is an image of a handwritten note that features the words “Kelly Preston carried baby,” “medical bills paid” and “old Jaguar 1990s-ish,” as well as a screenshot of messages presumably exchanged with Priscilla Presley that describe Ben Travolta as her “beautiful great-grandson.”
Lockwood further allegedly claimed that “the entire arrangement required a ‘sign off’ from the Church of Scientology, which heavily involved Priscilla’s oversight.” According to the document, Lockwood “demanded” the information be used “to orchestrate a settlement for him and his daughters,” whom he said were “financially destitute.”
Kruse and Fialko’s amended complaint against Garcia alleges that he “threw a tantrum, demanding [they] keep Riley’s and Travolta’s son out of the press, since Priscilla [had] promised him that he would be the only male musician in the family and would now be the ‘king.’” The document also claims “Priscilla’s love for Navarone was, and always has been, incestuous.”
The filing is the latest in the legal feud involving Presley and her former business partner. Presley previously filed a lawsuit against Kruse and her associates alleging fraud and elder abuse. Kruse and Fialko, meanwhile, are suing Presley for fraud and breach of contract.
“After losing motion after motion in this case, and unsuccessfully seeking to have Presley’s counsel of record, Marty Singer, disqualified from representing her in this matter, Brigitte Kruse, Kevin Fialko, and their co-conspirators have demonstrated that there is no bar too low, no ethical line that they are unwilling to cross in an effort to cause further pain to Priscilla Presley and her family,” Presley’s attorneys Singer and Wayne Harman said in a statement to TMZ.
“In a completely improper effort to exert undue pressure on Presley to retract her legitimate, truthful claims, Kruse and her co-conspirators have also sued Presley’s son, cousin, and assistant,” the statement continued. “These recent outrageous allegations have absolutely nothing to do with the claims in this case. The conduct of Kruse, Fialko, and their new lawyers (they are on their fourth set of attorneys) is shameful, and it absolutely will be addressed in court.”
Representatives for Keough did not respond immediately Thursday to The Times’ request for comment.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: Paul Feig’s ‘The Housemaid’ is a twisty horror-thriller with nudity and empowerment – Sentinel Colorado
Santa left us a present this holiday season and it is exactly what we didn’t know we needed: A twisty, psychological horror-thriller with nudity that’s all wrapped up in an empowerment message.
“The Housemaid” is Paul Feig’s delicious, satirical look at the secret depravity of the ultra-rich, but it’s so well constructed that’s it’s not clear who’s naughty or nice. Halfway through, the movie zigs and everything you expected zags.
It’s almost impossible to thread the line between self-winking campy — “That’s a lot of bacon. Are you trying to kill us?” — and carving someone’s stomach with a broken piece of fine china, yet Feig and screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine do.
Sydney Sweeney stars as a down-on-her luck Millie Calloway, a gal with a troubled past living out of her car who answers an ad for a live-in housekeeper in a tony suburb of New York City. Her resume is fraudulent, as are her references.
Somehow, the madam of the mansion, Nina Winchester played with frosty excellence by Amanda Seyfried in pearls and creamy knits, takes a shine to this young soul. “I have a really good feeling about this, Millie,” she says in that perky, slightly crazed clipped way that Seyfried always slays with. “This is going to be fun, Millie.”
Maybe not for Millie, but definitely for us. The young housekeeper gets her own room in the attic — weird that it closes with a deadbolt from the outside, but no matter — and we’re off. Mille gets a smartphone with the family’s credit card preloaded and a key for that deadbolt. “What kind of monsters are we?” asks Nina. Indeed.
The next day, the house is a mess when the housekeeper comes down and Seyfried is in a wide-eyed, crashing-plates, full-on psychotic rage. The sweet, supportive woman we met the day before is gone. But her hunky husband (Brandon Sklenar) is helpful and apologetic. And smoldering. Uh-oh. Did we mention he’s hunky?
If at first we understand that the housekeeper is being a little manipulative — lying to get the job, for instance, or wearing glasses to seem more serious — we soon realize that all kinds of gaslighting games are being played behind these gates, and they’re much more impactful.
Based on Freida McFadden’s novel, “The Housemaid” rides waves of manipulation and then turns the tables on what we think we’ve just seen, looking at male-female power structures and how privilege can trap people without it.
The film is as good looking as the actors, with nifty touches like having the main house spare, well-lit and bright, while the husband’s private screening room in the basement is done in a hellish red. There are little jokes throughout, like the husband and the housemaid bonding over old episodes of “Family Feud,” with the name saying it all.
Feig and his team also have fun with horror movie conventions, like having a silent, foreboding groundskeeper, adding a creepy dollhouse and placing lightning and thunder during a pivotal scene. They surround the mansion with fussy, aristocratic PTA moms who have tea parties and say things like “You know what yoga means to me.”
Feig’s fascinating combination of gore, torture and hot sex ends happily, capped off with Taylor Swift’s perfectly conjured “I Did Something Bad” playing over the end credits. Not at all: This naughty movie is definitely on the nice list.
“The Housemaid,” a Lionsgate release that’s in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence, gore, language, sexuality/nudity and drug use. Running time: 131 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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Entertainment
How Southern California punk veterans built 84 Days’ politically charged debut album
When playing in a legendary South Bay punk band is your day job, most people likely wouldn’t have too many musical side projects. But most people aren’t Pennywise bassist Randy Bradbury.
Having frequently kept the door open for different bands and genres of music, Bradbury’s newest project is the Huntington Beach-based 84 Days. The trio features the veteran songwriter on guitar and lead vocals, Grammy-winning rock producer Cameron Webb on bass and No Doubt’s Adrian Young on drums (at least for the self-titled debut album) — and while 84 Days’ sound and tempo differs significantly from Pennywise, it’s still very much a punk-leaning rock band.
When asked about the name, Bradbury says, “The term ’84 Days’ originally started as an inside joke back when I was a teenager, but watching the world change so much it seems to be a fitting description for how things have become … like something I read in a book once. And now we’re in it.”
Though it may seem odd to launch a new band after more than a collective century of experience in the music industry, Bradbury and Webb agree that 84 Days “sounded like too much fun” to not pursue. And if their debut show at DiPiazza’s in Long Beach back in November was anything to go off of, it’ll be a good time for fans too.
“I think the Randy Bradbury name is bigger than you would think,” Webb says via Zoom. “People obviously relate him to Pennywise, but he’s an individual that a lot of people like — especially other musicians. Everyone knows him and thinks he’s great, so people have just been really supportive of everything.”
“I was just waiting to see what the reaction to the songs would be,” Bradbury adds. “I’d say it’s been very positive so far, so I think we’ll have Green Day opening for us in about a year.”
Jokes about the new band’s popularity aside, Bradbury and Webb’s years in the industry have given 84 Days the kind of platform and connections most bands can only dream of. Case in point, when Young was unable to continue with his drumming duties for the band’s first live shows, Bradbury was able to recruit his friend Erik “Smelly” Sandin from NOFX to fill in for the time being.
“We’ve both been in the Southern California music scene for decades, so I know a lot of people and made a lot of friends,” Bradbury says. “I’ve kept note of who are the players I look up to and would love to play with; as soon as I found out Adrian wasn’t going to play with us, I knew I was going to ask [Sandin].”
“We’re friends with these people because I work with them or Randy tours with them, so we cross paths all the time in the studio or at shows,” Webb says. “Everyone’s been really supportive of me, who doesn’t do it every day. No one’s like ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’ They’re like, ‘I can’t wait to see this’ or ‘You’re going to kill it.’ So it does make me feel good to see the community be excited for us to play a show.”
But as Bradbury is quick to point out, all of those connections are “contingent on if you’re doing something interesting” and if the music itself is actually good. Thankfully, between Bradbury’s elite writing chops and Webb’s tastemaking ability (as usually seen behind the scenes on other bands’ albums), 84 Days’ self-titled debut isn’t just a fun punk jaunt but a deep look into how the songwriter views the current state of society and the world — including topics that wouldn’t exactly fit ahead of “Bro Hymn” in a Pennywise setlist.
Even though 84 Days may have been founded around the idea of being a “fun” project for its members, none of them is interested in sticking with it if the band itself is less than stellar. While Bradbury is used to performing for a living, the looming threat of live shows encouraged Webb to genuinely practice and tighten his bass skills, having primarily only picked one up previously to help in the studio from time to time.
“I grab instruments a lot, but now I had to learn all these songs and rehearse them,” Webb says. “I’ve got to know my s— and play them as well as the pros that do it every single day. I want us to be a killer band, so we’re going to be a killer band. That just means it’s time to stop goofing around. Instead of going home and watching TV, I’m practicing. I’m learning parts. I’m working on riffs. I’m doing all of that. It’s super fun because Randy makes it a great experience. We’re having a good time doing it and everything’s real positive, so we’re going to keep doing it.”
Just a few shows and one album into their career, it’s too early to tell what the ceiling is for 84 Days. The duo could see it continuing to just play bars and small venues or growing into something much larger. In fact, Bradbury laughs at the idea of some of the bands he knows opening for them — as long as it’s not his new band upstaging Pennywise.
“I think that that tour would end with a lot of bruises on my body and a lot of smashed guitars and basses.”
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