"Justice for Sensitive People!" Jensen McRae Talks Debut Album
Album art for Are You Happy Now? Courtesy of Jensen McRae
If your Spotify Wrapped aura was “yearning and wistful,” or the extent of your romantic endeavors is a slew of crushes and situationships, or you’re a college student who still has yet to have your first kiss, then Jensen McRae’s new album is just the thing for you.
McRae got her first taste of stardom when her song “Immune” went viral on Twitter seemingly overnight in Jan. of 2021. Since then she’s collaborated with X Ambassadors and Joy Oladokun, performed with Rufus Wainwright and Jake Wesley Rogers, and released her very first project—her EP “Who Hurt You?” 2021 was a big year for the 24-year-old Los Angeles native, and 2022 is shaping up to be even bigger as McRae begins touring with Maude Latour and Amos Lee. With her timeless yet perpetually aesthetic sound, she is able to spread the Sad Girl gospel across generations.
McRae’s debut album, Are You Happy Now? dropped yesterday, Mar. 22, but most of the album was created over three years ago when she was attending USC for a bachelor’s degree in popular music.
“I was very lucky in terms of scheduling and I finished pretty much all my degree requirements by the fall of my senior year,” Mcrae said. “It was definitely [still] very overwhelming just because I was balancing an existential crisis feeling of being about to graduate.”
The album consists of 13 songs, including all of the EP, two singles, and five previously unreleased songs.
“The point of the album is to be a coming of age story. The interludes on the album are about me kind of writing love letters to my parents and the ways they tried to protect my innocence and my happiness growing up but ultimately weren't able to because the influence of the world always finds its way in somehow,” McRae said.
With rich, smooth vocals McRae can call forth any cry-worthy image she desires with ease and take the listener on a journey through their own hidden emotions. The most recently released single off of the album, “Happy Girl,” perfectly captures this seemingly telepathic ability McRae has in a heartbreakingly beautiful, painfully visceral way.
“One of the things that I was so fascinated by is like the language gap between pain and the expression of pain. It's very difficult to actually explain to someone what pain, especially psychic pain, feels like,” she said. “And so [“Happy Girl”] is essentially about giving up on trying to express and close that gap…and sometimes just not bothering to explain it at all and just putting on a happy face because you don't want to let down the people who care about you.”
McRae says that this motif of mental health is the core focus of Are You Happy Now?, citing the metaphorical growing pains she went through in college as a young woman as inspiration.
“There's a couple [of] love songs on the album because I was in college writing it and I was experiencing a lot of stuff for the first time romantically, but those aren't the focal point of the album,” she said.
The singer-songwriter stressed the importance of tailoring music that wasn’t inherently romantic towards girls and women.
“I feel like when I was a kid, I wrote love songs constantly because I thought that was what people wanted to hear. Then, as I was approaching this first album, naturally what came out was not really a focus on romantic love, but rather on self self-reflection and self-reliance.”
Much of Are You Happy Now? focuses on the feelings that surround being a late bloomer when it comes to more “adult” experiences.
“I saw a TikTok recently that was like ‘we need a Taylor Swift for people with no romantic history’ and I stitched that and I said, ‘Hello, my name is Jensen Mcrae!’” She laughed. “Late blooming is definitely underrated, and this album is about that kind of growth.”
McRae expressed that she felt like she was “four years behind schedule” when she didn’t get that typical high school and early college experience.
“But, it was perfect timing for me,” she said.
Despite only now releasing her debut album, due to there not being a “good window to put it out,” McRae is already working on her second album.
“[The second album] is exploring more of what I can do vocally and melodically and definitely thematically. I think it's kind of me grappling with what it means to be the villain,” she said.
McRae explained Are You Happy Now? as a “hero’s journey” where you’re rooting for her, while the second album is more of an exploration of “what it means when you can't always be the good guy.”
“I think sometimes you need to be critical [of yourself] in order to push yourself out of bad habits and situations. You need to eat to allow yourself the possibility to get your ass kicked a little bit,” McRae said.
With this debut album, McRae wants “the people who need [her] to find [her].”
“I'm really excited for college and high school girls who are figuring themselves out and feel a little lost and a little adrift to listen to this album,” she said. “Listen to my music and scream and cry in your bedroom and write in your journal and drive in your car in the rain.”
Are You Happy Now? is for everyone who was ever told that they had “big emotions” or that they were too soft. McRae wants listeners to know that they can “channel that sensitivity and their creativity into really magical things.”
“I just want people, especially young women, to feel seen and to know that the big things that they feel are valid and they are real and they are not too much. You are not too much,” McRae said.
“Justice for the sensitive people and the young kids who are crying along to songs and movies and writing love letters…this [album] is for you.”