Jensen McRae
Caity Krone
Earlier this month singer-songwriter Jensen McRae tweeted a playful joke about Phoebe Bridgers. “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," read the tweet. The tweet went viral and McRae followed it up with a short clip of herslef performing the imagined song that caught even more attention, including that of Bridgers.
Striking while the iron is hot, McRae has now dropped a studio version of the song, which is titled "Immune." The track was recorded with Kendrick Lamar producer Rahki and acts as a warm up for McRae's debut album, due later in 2021. The album is likely to include McRae's non-parody related songs "Wolves" and "The Plague."
"A couple weeks ago I had this idea about the idea of the vaccination anthem," McRae said in a statement. "This pandemic has colored pop culture permanently, whether we like it or not. On the way to us, almost inevitably, are pandemic romcoms and pandemic novels and, in my case, pandemic songs. This song came about partly as a joke, a parody of one of my favorite songwriters of all time, Phoebe Bridgers, who specializes in dark, spare, precise lyrics about Our Unprecedented Times. My prediction about how Bridgers would tackle love in the time of vaccination—and an accompanying clip of the hypothetical song—took off on Twitter, so me and my producer, Rahki, decided to finish the song and turn it into something that sounds like me. It’s about how the emotional stakes of our relationships have been ratcheted up in light of global calamity, about hipsters and science and dogs and love. Enjoy."
