Jensen McRae’s Phoebe Bridgers Parody “Immune” Gets An Official Release

Caity Krone

Jensen McRae’s Phoebe Bridgers Parody “Immune” Gets An Official Release

Caity Krone

A couple weekends ago, LA singer-songwriter Jensen McRae tweeted, “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.” It was a savvy sendup of Bridgers’ shtick, even more so when McRae followed up the description with a one-minute performance snippet that perfectly captured that trembling, hilarious-yet-devastating style that made Bridgers one of 2020’s breakout stars. The parody garnered praise from Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino and an “oh my god” from Bridgers herself. And now a full-length studio version of the song is here.

Officially titled “Immune,” the Rahki-produced track could easily slide in as an addendum on Punisher. It also serves as a fine introduction to McRae, a promising talent in her own right, whose debut album is expected later this year. She shared this statement about the whole ordeal:

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 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.

Below, check out “Immune,” McRae’s original tweets, and her 2020 single “Wolves.”

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