When 27-year-old folk singer Jensen McRae received an Instagram message from Justin Bieber praising her viral breakup song “Massachusetts”, she thought it was a one-off. But then came an invite to an impromptu jamming session at his home studio with eight other musicians. By the end of the day, they had laid down vocals for a dozen songs together. “He was incredibly encouraging in the room. Every time I would start singing something, he would be motioning for me to keep going,” she tells me down the phone from an Amsterdam hotel. “He just called me the other day to tell me that he is so grateful to know me, like saying, ‘I’m so proud of you.’”
It’s no surprise that Bieber is just one of the A-list musicians clamouring to work with McRae following the release of her bewitching double breakup album I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!, which she is touring in the UK and Ireland from next week. The album, a level up from her pop-inflected 2022 debut, Are You Happy Now?, sounds like Tracy Chapman is crooning along to a gut-wrenching Phoebe Bridgers track in her deep, buttery voice. And you can’t miss the articulate Taylor Swift-inspired lyricism, either. We know that the male subject of “I Can Change Him” wears cheap cologne and hand-rolls his cigarettes.
