#jensenmcrae

2021 may have begun with Olivia Rodrigo controlling the narrative, but it may very well end with Joshua Bassett at the wheel.

I’ll put the usual disclaimers--I don’t know any of these children personally, and I don’t know what actually went down behind the scenes at the turn of the last decade when a supposed love triangle supposedly fractured the hearts and egos of all involved and led to some midlevel Internet drama which ultimately took a backseat to the genuine article--Sour, the 18-year-old Rodrigo’s record-shattering debut LP. In case you missed it: Rodrigo and Bassett started dating in secret while playing an onscreen couple in a Disney+ High School Musical spinoff, Bassett broke up with Rodrigo because of their age difference - he’s almost 21 - and in a suspiciously short amount of time began dating and cutely posting with 22-year-old Sabrina Carpenter, another artist and Disney alum. Teenage digital sleuths searched for Easter eggs in the style of Rodrigo’s biggest influence, Taylor Swift, while I became consumed with the parallel’s between Rodrigo’s experience and my own--feeling disproportionately large affection for men who can never reciprocate, drowning in insecurity over the Eurocentric beauty standard that makes being cast aside in favor of a fair-skinned blonde take on an extra sharp edge, splashing the thinly veiled narrative of my heartbreak across the web. That, instead of the logistics and timeline of the real people involved, was my Met Gala.

The culture-defining “drivers license” was Sour’s lead single, and its chokehold on the popular imagination has persisted even though it dropped way back in January. Perhaps the only narrative powerful enough to displace was the tale at the center of Taylor Swift’s Red rerelease, the storied ten-minute (and explicit!) version of “All Too Well” that did its own record-breaking and spawned an endless scroll of TikTok speculation about what the scarf really means and what Jake Gyllenhaal’s publicist must be doing right now. Again, I’m less concerned with what actually happened--it’s none of my business anyway--and more with what it means for every young woman who’s ever fallen for a withholding, condescending older guy. (Admittedly though I’m concerned with the scarf. I totally thought the scarf was a metaphor. Apparently it’s a real scarf and he actually stole it AND THEN WORE IT? AND WAS PHOTOGRAPHED IN IT? Dude. Major party foul.)

It’s worth noting that Taylor Swift, like many songwriters of her ilk of all genders, has dated fewer songwriters than non-songwriters. Even though John Mayer famously used “Paper Doll” as a late retort to “Dear John,” there are few examples of musical rebuttal to the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe. Frankly, I don’t have strong feelings about that either way. While I’m ravenous for “Style (Taylor’s Version) (feat. Harry Styles),” I will be able to go on living if it doesn’t happen. I’ve come to expect that musical explorations of relationships will flatten and distort the facts; I accept them as autofiction rather than pure autobiography; I listen knowing I will never understand the story that inspired it completely.

Enter Joshua Bassett, on the precipice of dropping a three-song EP that seems to be the auditory equivalent of a “reply all.”

Bassett has been teasing each of the three tracks on TikTok; the first one I saw opened with the line “my label said to never waste a crisis.” Clearly he’s going for directness. The songs seem to tackle hate, regret, defiance, fear--it’s a sort of anti-apoplexy, choosing to write instead of fight or fly. It’s apparent that he wants to have this conversation on his own terms. When Saturday Night Live spoofed “drivers license,” Bassett took the sharpest line at his own expense and turned it into merch (if you look up “my bitch ex Gina is Joshua Bassett,” a link to a long-sleeve bearing the slogan on his website appears). But aside from that admittedly hilarious marketing move, and posting vague messages of support about Rodrigo’s success, he’s remained quiet. His own release earlier this year didn’t seem related to Rodrigo’s aside from timing, and his public persona has been more about Harry Styles than his relationship status. Sabrina Carpenter, the “blonde girl,” released her own confusing addition to the chaos with “Skin,” which, in addition to being bizarrely braggadocious, lacked the precision and pathos of Rodrigo’s work. But now, Joshua Bassett has decided it’s his time to speak.

Bassett is much harder to paint as a villain than Gyllenhaal. The main reason is that the couple split apart on Rodrigo’s Sour is comprised of two young people, whereas the narrative on Red is about an older man who should have known better than to get involved with a girl who was newly 21. Additionally, Sour seems to traffic in gray areas--“you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor,” “and I just can’t imagine how you could be so okay now that I’m gone,” “I guess the therapist I found for you, she really helped.” Compare that, then, with the details unraveled by the ten-minute version of “All Too Well” - “I’ll get older but your lovers stay my age,” “you call me up again just to break me like a promise,” “any time now, he’s gonna say it’s love, you never called it what it was.” In my view, part of the enjoyment of Sour was how much pain you can feel even if the other person isn’t an outright villain. It’s about how there is no way good or fair way to break someone’s heart, how seeing your ex with someone new can sting no matter how much time passes. What’s compelling, then, is Bassett writing his half of the story, grappling with the guilt of breaking the heart of someone he genuinely cared for, the limits of grace when you, too, are a child trying to love and be loved, and the world is hell-bent on calling you the problem. Admittedly, I thought back to a failed almost-relationship of my own, when my subtweets about the grief wounded the person who left me. Time has passed and we are friends and we both finally see each other for who we are--not egomaniacs, not dreams or ideals, but people.

My Emotional Support Albums 1. Kaleidoscope Heart 2. Continuum 3. Stranger in the Alps 4. Little Voice 5. Punisher 6. For Emma, Forever Ago 7. Saves The World 8. DAMN. 9. CTRL 10. About U

Minor Inconveniences That Have Triggered Major Panic Attacks For Me 1. Any time I’ve ever been late 2. Plane delays 3. Having to pee really bad 4. The food I ordered taking a really long time and then not coming at all 5. Seeing the boy I secretly loved kiss his girlfriend outside the venue I’d just performed in 6. Loud, crowded restaurants 7. Concerts where I don’t know any of the songs 8. Not eating for an hour 9. Being told I’m trying too hard 10. Being told I’m not trying hard enough

Things I Dream About To Help Me Sleep 1. Performing on SNL 2. Being a guest on Seth Meyers 3. Being a guest on Pete Holmes’ podcast 4. Confronting my ex-best friend about why he stopped talking to me 5. Confronting the boy I dated for 2 months about why he stopped talking to me 6. Donald Trump going to jail 7. The United States finally getting a high speed rail system 8. Running into ✨him✨ in a coffee shop when we’re 30 and he realizes he wanted me all along 9. Chris Evans and I walking a dog together 10. Avan Jogia and I doing a 2000s-movie makeover montage

Forgetting is a privilege I won’t indulge this time. There is plenty to excavate, but I won’t. Once I thrust my hands into the wet flesh of a plum and got dark fruit under my nails. It took weeks to get the stains out. Every day of my adolescence I prayed to a god I only half-believed in to disappear. Felt sinful to take up so much space. Thought the holiest thing I could be was gone. Now mind you my hands still shake when I bathe in perfumes and dress in my finest, I’m still not crushing it, Haven’t turned the pill of my pain into powders yet, Still don’t understand the mechanics of swallowing it, Still don’t even know what that will do. But this is the age of expanding, This is the age of blooming and knocking over valuables with my petals. This is the age of volume and depth, When I am beholden to no one and can feign ignorance for what the painted glass was even worth. I want to remember this year by the mouth of it, I want to know it by tongue. The heart shudders and gasps, Collides and collapses, A bird in an airport, A bird in an airport, And I cup it in my hands as it beats and it thrashes, A wild thing long since jailbroken from its cage.

created by one of my listeners - @awildsaraa on instagram!

if you haven’t streamed my new single immune........wyd

Loving you is a dream from my childhood. Your body is the shooting range my father drives me to in his all-black pickup on Sunday morning. He’s never taken me to fire guns but in the dream I am ten years old in overalls and he presses a finger to his lips with a smile. Don’t tell your mother. My heart is the loaded gun he hands me when we get inside. It’s a rifle that fits perfectly in my hands with a trigger I am terrified to pull. My lower lip trembles but he tells me that weaponry runs in the family. As if knowing that your imminent destruction is hereditary makes the recoil hurt less. If my mother loves like a gardener overwatering a cactus, My father loves like a trained assassin. Perhaps I was doomed to destroy you— To drive a bullet straight into your chest cavity and try to clean the scar with enough water to flood a greenhouse. In a harshly lit kitchen on South Orchard Street you tap your beer bottle to my wine glass— The better to dress your wounds with. The backyard is dark and people are drunk on perceived remedies, So intoxicated that they fire into each other and plan on blaming it on liquor in the morning. I wish my musket was alcohol’s fault. That it wasn’t hardwired into my circuitry from before I knew the word for “gun.” When you kiss me, my hands sweat on the trigger. Something goes off inside me and I mistake it for fireworks.

I am the best thing that has ever happened to me. I am the most famous person I have never heard of. I call a girl better at healing than I am and tell her that I have learned not to love anyone who refuses to meet me where I am. I do not know where that is but I hear it’s lovely. All I know is that it’s far. I wake up and start walking. The morning is quieter than expected. Like I slept through a hurricane, Clean streets still dripping, windows blown out. I don’t recognize any of it. On the way to myself I encounter a baker’s dozen of impostors— I stop them all and ask where I’ve seen them before, If they come here often, If they have any recommendations. As if they know me. As if they could a hazard a guess at my hazardous taste. They get good at camouflage. I walk a crow’s murder of miles before I notice they’re all still beside me. They ask questions bearing answers they are not prepared to hear. They ask to stop for gas and pads and potato chips. They ask if we’re there yet. They ask who I am and why I look so old and why I look so familiar.