Jensen McRae’s Emotional Sophomore Album Has Surprising Fan Favorites

As she heads into another international leg of her headline tour, McRae talks album writing and connecting with fans live

PHOTO BY BAO NGO

Indisputably one of 2025’s best releases, Jensen McRae’s sophomore album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, takes listeners through the ups and downs of trauma and heartbreak. In the precise way that trauma and healing from it moves non-linearly, McRae’s album drops deep into hurtful memories and rises out with self determination, then falls back and emerges again. 

Opening with “The Rearranger,” listeners are immediately introduced to McRae’s impressive and captivating vocal range. She dances into high vibratos and dips into her warm lower register, adding depth to each moment, pulling you along the journey. Her range of capability is even further proven as the album moves between emotional power ballads (“Savannah”), more experimental composition (“Daffodils,” “I Don’t Do Drugs”) and the folk-pop hits her fans will surely await each time they see her. 

Lyrically, the album unfolds with threads between songs and vivid, emotional details. Listeners following the tracks in order — which this album wholeheartedly deserves at least once — will find McRae calling back to previous lines with a new meaning. 

Early on the tracklist, in “Let Me Be Wrong,” she sings about making her own mistakes even if she knows they’ll hurt, “Let me get lost, the hard way is the way I want / And I’ve been good too long / Let me be wrong.” Later, in “Mother Wound,” she sings about a lover whose danger signs she ignored early on, saying, “You’d been the good guy for a little too long / I read your cards right, but I wish I’d been wrong for once.” 

When Pleaser spoke with McRae about her writing process, she shared that these moments aren’t so intentional as habitual, but they’re a welcome treat for her to discover as well when listening back. Like McRae’s own fans might feel, she compares it to the excitement of finding a lyrical reference in a Taylor Swift song five albums prior, the exciting and satisfying moments of seeing it all connect.

Crafting the tracklist

While the tracklist is rife with song titles and lyrics that stick with a listener, it’s interestingly framed by a title inspired by McRae’s favorite movie, Back to The Future. A character, in McRae’s words, “believes they are facing certain death and they say, ‘They found me, I don’t know how but they found me.’ And then, by the end of the movie, you come to find that in fact they were destined to survive this encounter all along.” Besides getting to fulfill a long time wish of referencing the movie, McRae explained how this encapsulates the experiences inspiring the album.

“I also felt like it was a really apt experience of going through any kind of trauma, where you have a point in your healing process where you hit rock bottom, and you feel like there’s no way you’re possibly going to survive this. And then of course you survive everything except for the last thing,” she said. “That realization that you had all of the tools that you needed to survive all along, that really felt like to me the thesis of the album.”

The tracklist similarly follows a path of “false starts,” set backs, and in the end, “genuine healing.” 

“I really wanted the listening experience of the album to feel sort of like every time you feel like you’re in the clear from pain, in fact there’s more pain underneath that,” McRae said.

She jumps from the time-old insistence in “I Can Change Him” to permission for failure in “Let Me be Wrong.” After digging deep into the unbalanced two sides of hurt on “Tuesday” and “Mother Wound,” the track “Praying For Your Downfall” gives a clever lyrical turn: she is finished wishing bad on the one who hurt her, knowing it will come from them staying stagnant while she moves on.

With such an emotionally charged tracklist and progression, there is naturally an editorial process to choosing final songs. One McRae says was actually a surprising addition to the tracklist is her hit single, “Massachusetts.” She says the song wasn’t intended to be part of this project when writing it. In fact, she only just finished writing it when recording began, but the production changed her view of it, and it began to feel like a true conclusion to the story. 

Meanwhile, songs that would have been the earliest written for the project remained in demos for a later date — if to be released at all. It’s this careful discernment that’s proof of concept for McRae’s work, which blends characterized story telling (“Novelty”) with unmistakable, recurring details, all to result in a firmly cohesive album showing her writing and vocal strengths alike.

Connecting with fans on tour

McRae set out on tour for this album in Spring 2025, and is still making her way around the world. This week, she kicks off tour dates in Australia, traveling with Laneway Festival and hosting her own headliner shows in Sydney and Melbourne. 

In different countries, McRae says there are different fan favorite songs — and surprising ones, at that. She says overseas, “I Can Change Him” had a big response, and her intuition that “Savannah” would get crowds screaming along was correct (And lucky for the fans, as she said, the track was one she had to push for making the final cut!).

“Every show is a little bit different, and there have been shows where real sleeper songs come out,” she said. “There have been shows where I’ve played ‘Tuesday,’ everyone is singing every word. And that’s only happened maybe once or twice.”

Fans of what may become deep cuts, like “I Don’t Do Drugs,” will be pleased to hear that McRae appreciates each time a crowd shows up for their song. 

“Every song on the album I have such a soft spot for,” she said. “So that’s really cool when one of the ones that isn’t streaming as much, for example…it seems like for some reason this group of people in this city really gets it.”

Whether it’s the B-side hard hitters or setlist staples they’re singing along to, it’s guaranteed McRae’s crowds will get an emotional experience from her shows. If I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! is anything to judge by — and it is a wonderful execution — McRae is surely only up from here.