Kevin Bronson on January 28th, 2021

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“What is life, if not one long joke that gets taken too far?” asks 23-year-old Jensen McRae of how her song “Immune” came into existence.

On Jan. 14, McRae posted a humorous tweet in which she imagines 2023 Phoebe Bridgers song that looks back on love in the time of COVID. She even posted a 50-clip of what the song might sound like. It got a lot of attention, including from Bridgers herself (“Oh my god.”).

Then the Woodland Hills-reared, USC-schooled McRae — already rightly on tastemakers’ “artists-to-watch” list for her 2019 single “White Boy” and two more singles she released in 2020 — got together with executive producer Rahki to finish the song. It’s a brilliant homage, both lyrically and musically.

Upon the song’s official release Wednesday, McRae said: “A couple weeks ago I had this idea about the idea of the vaccination anthem. This pandemic has colored pop culture permanently, whether we like it or not. On the way to us, almost inevitably, are pandemic rom-coms 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.”

||| Stream: “Immune”