Take Cover: Daniel Rossen takes on JoJo
Not all covers are created equal. There are the straight-ahead renditions, and then there are the personal twists and complete genre re-workings. There are the covers that render your favorite songs unlistenable and, maybe most importantly, the kind that take a song you’d never given a second thought to and trigger that ah-ha! moment: “So that‘s what this is all about!” Suffice to say, most of us probably didn’t give JoJo’s 2006 hit “Too Little Too Late” a first thought. In late 2007, Daniel Rossen took on the challenge to transform the song from its original polished pop production for Grizzly Bear bandmate and unabashed tween pop lover Ed Droste’s 29th birthday. Rossen takes all the teenage heartbreak and dresses it up in signature vocal harmonies and eerie chord substitutions. The result is as amusing as it is haunting, almost able to blend in alongside cuts from Yellow House or In Ear Park. Almost. Not all the lyric slurs in the world can distract us from the fact that Daniel Rossen is in fact singing “With a player like you / I don’t have a prayer.”
