Artist POV: Jensen McRae, Pop’s Next Rising Star Goes Big

When Jensen McRae’s management team first found her, she was only doing covers on Instagram. Kristin Gregory at Family Business Enterprises was scrolling through her page on social media back in 2018, and Gregory was impressed by her tone and control.

McRae, the singer/songwriter who writes acoustic pop ballads with hints of Americana who has an angelic voice, is releasing her upcoming album, I Don’t Know How But They Found Me, on April 25 via Dead Oceans, with its latest single, “Savannah,” having been released on March 20. Last year, she joined Noah Kahan on tour last year, appearing at amphitheaters across North America. She’s set to head out on a headline tour of her own, spanning from May 3 to Aug. 9, with dates in high-profile clubs across North America. She and her team have been envisioning this moment for years, with the first conversations starting three years ago.

“It’s been in the works for a long time,” McRae’s agent, Ben Schiffer at WME, says. “We’ve really charted our course very far in advance and left a lot of room to be dynamic. I’ve been working with Jensen, Kristin and Armand for five years. So, even though we started plotting this specific tour a year out in anticipation of the album, we’ve been charting this course for even longer. This is all something we’ve been building for the last two or three years.”

With her headline tour getting ready to launch, McRae is looking forward to hitting the road. She’ll be joined by her brother, Holden McRae, on keyboards and her best friend, Kevin Burke on guitar. She notes the drummer and bass player are newer to the band, but is looking forward to getting to know them.

“I love playing in New York City, so I’m super stoked for the Bowery shows,” McRae says. “And L.A. is my hometown and El Rey is a longtime favorite venue, so those will be really special, too.”

So far, the team’s been thrilled with the tour’s ticket sales. McRae will perform two sold-out nights at Bowery Ballroom on May 7 and 8, and she has two hometown shows at Los Angeles’ El Rey Theatre on May 28 and 29, with the first date already sold out.

Ticket sales have been amazing,” Schiffer says. “The outpouring of affection for the music and desire to see Jensen live has been wonderful. We have sold out shows not just here in North America, but in the UK as well. We added second nights in New York and L.A., and we’ve sold out shows all over the country.”

Troy Armand adds, “Her agent told us a stat late last year that before Jensen goes out on this opening run, she will have done somewhere between 80 to 95 shows in the last two years. It’s been really awesome to see her growth throughout that process. The thing we’re most looking forward to is just seeing rooms full of people that are specifically there for her.”

Her management team isn’t surprised by the outpouring of success. Gregory was struck by McRae the instant she landed on her Instagram page, and has been an avid fan ever since. “It immediately captivated me,” Gregory says. “So I scrolled all the way down the page. You know it’s serious when you scroll all the way down to the bottom.”

At the time, McRae only had one original song, a brief snippet of “White Boy,” but already Gregory was hooked.

“I hit her up to come out to a singer/songwriter showcase I was booking in West Hollywood and told her we have a draw for these types of shows,” Gregory says. “I asked if she could bring 25 people and she didn’t respond. So I followed back up and she’s like, ‘Look, I can’t bring 25 people.’ I personally just wanted her there, so I was like, ‘Can you bring three people? Just come, I want to see you perform.’ She performed and I shed a tear, I hadn’t been moved to tears by a performance in years. I posted her on my story and a good friend of mine, a producer named Rahki, hit me right away and said he needed to work with her. So that’s how it all started.”

Once Rahki and McRae started working together, Gregory remained on the A&R side. But, as the two began to finish up McRae’s debut album, Rahki encouraged Gregory to sign on as manager.

Troy was also a fan of McRae’s music at the time, and began speaking with Gregory as a friend and helping her bounce ideas around for how to amplify McRae’s career. But a year after the whole group started coming together, the pandemic hit.

“And it was my first time being a manager,” Gregory says. “I did some day-to-day management when I was at Interscope years back, but managing someone’s career on my own from the ground up and the pandemic hits – I felt so lost at that point. So I was hitting up Armand pretty frequently and we were just soundboarding. I felt like we had the same vision and he was so passionate about Jensen. At a certain point, I was like, ‘I’m taking a lot of this man’s time. I may as well bring him in and give him some equity on this,’ and that’s how he started.”

When it comes to being on stage, McRae notes she’s always grateful to do what she does with her closest friends and family. As she describes it, “There have been so many moments in so many shows where everyone is in sync and we’re all just looking at each other like, ‘Are we really this lucky? This is really happening?’”