Jensen McRae Brings the God Has a Hitman Tour to San Diego
Tuesday nights at Music Box don’t usually feel like turning points, but Jensen McRae has a way of making small rooms feel enormous. The Los Angeles-born singer-songwriter arrived on India Street for the San Diego stop of her God Has A Hitman Tour, an artist who has grown from a promising young songwriter into a fully formed star. Opening the evening was Marie Dresselhuis, whose delicate fingerpicking and plainspoken delivery set a tone of careful attention — exactly the headspace you want an audience in before McRae takes over. By the time the lights shifted and McRae stepped to the mic, the room had already agreed on something: whatever was about to happen, it deserved to be listened to closely.
Marie Dresselhuis, a singer-songwriter from Vancouver, has captured audiences with her blend of humor, charm, and relatable storytelling, and on Tuesday she arrived at Music Box with that exact combination intact. A Vancouver-born classical pianist turned prolific songwriter, Dresselhuis intertwines raw emotion and unflinching honesty with wit, crafting narratives that resonate broadly .Her debut album, A Little Quiet At First, released in 2025, is an exploration of grief, growth, and restoration as a messy, nonlinear, often circular process. Dresselhuis’s piano ballads and brief guitar segment were the perfect opening for the night.
She opened with a new song, “Your Friend” and the crowd leaned in almost instantly. After “Mother Wound” followed, McRae moved into fan-favorite “Savannah” a country-adjacent stealth single that builds until piano layers with guitar and McRae delivers a series of scathing indictments with grit and conviction. “My Ego Dies at the End” and “Good Legs” kept that thread taut before McRae eventually stripped it back to perform solo for a few songs.
The middle section of the set balanced weight with something closer to mischief. “Novelty” is a situationship anthem, an infectious testament to the enduring allure of the one who got away, and the Music Box crowd sang it back like they’d been waiting for permission to. A cover of Jesse McCartney’s “Beautiful Soul” arrived as a crowd-pleasing detour before she pivoted to “I Can Change Him” and a new song, “Just Like You,” that suggested whatever comes after this album may be even more assured. “Dead Girl Walking” and “White Boy” carried a sharper edge before the set softened again into the devastating “Daffodils,” which explores the softer side of McRae’s singing while its imagery brings the album’s juxtapositions into devastating focus.
“Let Me Be Wrong” is built on a simple melody and acoustic guitar that grows step over step — guitars layer, drums pick up the pace — and it begs to be shouted in unison with the biggest possible crowd. Music Box obliged. “Praying for Your Downfall” oozes snark and charm, cutting down a lover who’s no longer worth the ill will, and the room cackled and screamed in equal measure. The encore brought “Daffodils” and “I Don’t Do Drugs” — the heaviest emotional territory of the night — before McRae closed with “Massachusetts,” the viral closer that has had the entire room singing in unison.
McRae grew up an automatic outsider — a Black Jewish girl from Los Angeles, hellbent on making folk music in spite of the world’s attempts to box her into other genres — and looked to songwriting heroes like Alicia Keys, Carole King, James Taylor, and Stevie Wonder to build a sonic world entirely her own. What that world sounds like live, in a room the size of Music Box, was something special to behold. McRae has been writing in journals since she was eighteen, documenting everything, and the feeling Tuesday night was that you were hearing every one of those pages distilled into something that lands precisely where it intends to. If you have the chance to see the God Has A Hitman Tour, make sure you mark it down on your calendar.
