'Folk is one of the most human practices we have

Singer-songwriter Jensen McRae, about to embark on a tour of the UK, speaks to Ellie Muir about her double breakup album, wearing masks at her gigs and her friend Justin Bieber

- Ellie Muir

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, for instance, that the male subject of “I Can Change Him” wears cheap cologne and hand-rolls his cigarettes.

In the morning-after anthem “Novelty”, she imagines her love interest to have “navy bed sheets” at his bachelor pad in Shoreditch. On the nostalgic “Savannah”, about the symbolism of the Georgian city after her ex didn’t follow through on a promised trip there, she chants in her honeyed voice: “There is a bar you’re not allowed in on Bellevue/ A bloody-faced comet, you were a time bomb.” These songs often find McRae alone with her thoughts, appealing to God in her darkest moments or the company of disappointing and sometimes cruel men.