- Culture
- 28 Jan 21
"I realised how cathartic it is for people to listen to music that skewers and reflects this bizarre alternate reality back to them." Photo: Caity Krone
A few weeks ago, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Jensen McRae made headlines when she shared a snippet of a song she'd written in the style of Phoebe Bridgers singing about a time when coronavirus vaccines were becoming the norm.
Sharing the clip on Twitter, she joked: “in 2023 Phoebe Bridgers is gonna drop her third album & the opening track will be about hooking up in the car while waiting in line to get vaccinated at dodger stadium and it’s gonna make me cry.”
The song opens with simple guitar and McRae's otherworldly voice, singing: “Traffic from the East Side’s got me aggravated / Hotter than the day my brother graduated / Wait four hours in the sun / In line at Dodger Stadium / I’m not scared of dogs or getting vaccinated”.
this is my preemptive cover of what I imagine it will sound like pic.twitter.com/F9xpngAutF
— Jensen McRae (@Jensen_McRae) January 15, 2021
After Bridgers herself retweeted the clip, the young singer-songwriter went viral. Yesterday (January 28th) McRae released a full version of the song, called 'Immune'.
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Speaking to NME about the track, McRae said: “The way this pandemic has upended our lives has meant that pretty much no artist can escape writing about it. I imagined the fictional story of two friends whose dynamic has taken on a possibly false new dimension as a result of the chaos of the world, and how that chaos and the friendship would put kind of a lot of pressure on the relationship to be somehow life-changing.
“It’s also about how once the pandemic ‘ends’ —whenever that is—we’re all gonna have to find something new to talk about to each other.”
Watch the video below.