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It's over two years since US teen sensation JoJo first hit the charts with the No. 2 hit 'Leave (Get Out)' and a multi-platinum selling album... Now, at the ripe old age of 15, JoJo is back with the heart-felt ballad 'Too Little Too Late', a track which is "A timeless message about getting over your first love".Bearing in mind that she was only 15, I did find what I saw of that video a bit creepy, TBH, but I guess they were trying to sell this to teenage girls and they knew what they were doing. Apparently Disney-affiliated radio stations insisted on removing the lyric "stay the night" from the first verse, and I think they had a point for once.
If you don't Camille Jones vs Fedde Le Grand a few tracks ago, this is the first wholly original composition on the album since Calvin Harris. That's "original" in the sense that it's not covered or sampled, it's not the most imaginative or unprecedented composition I've ever encountered, as you might have predicted seeing the cavalcade of standard-issue songwriters involved in composing it. Indeed, there's a bit of a mismatch between the rather 80 AOR nature of the song itself and the early-2000s RnB production laid over it. The fact that this ended up as a JoJo record only adds to the confusion - as noted above, the lyric doesn't really suit somebody so young and her eager-to-please stage-school vocal performance doesn't really fit either style especially well. With a disparate set of ill-fitting elements, none of which is anything special in its own right, it's no wonder that this song seems to fade so abruptly after the obligatory long high note. It's as if that's the last box to be ticked before everyone can clock off and go down the pub.
In fairness, this was a significant hit at the time, but it was to be her last. A third album seems to have been caught up in red tape for a long time but is finally due to emerge in the US next month.
Also appearing on: Now 59, 60
Available on: The High Road
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