REVIEW: See You Again (Cover by Jasmine Thompson)
How good is Jasmine Thompson's cover of the mega-hit See You Again? So good, that the original single should have been released as See You Again, by Wiz Khalifa featuring Jasmine Thompson.
With this cover, Jasmine takes on one of the biggest world-wide hits of late 2014, early 2015. A tribute to the late Paul Walker of the Fast and Furious movie franchise, it is a moving song about loss and remembrance.
The song is a dueling duet of sorts consisting of both "normal" singing by Charlie Puth and rapping by Wiz Khalifa. Jasmine sings the Charlie Puth part, leaving off the rapping part from her cover. Hence, the cover clocks in at a relatively short two minutes.
Those two minutes are sheer heaven. The cover is spare, done simply with light piano backing, which lends emphasis to Jasmine's vocals. A great choice, since her vocals are so pure of tone, so achingly beautiful and ethereal, that the angels themselves would rave about how angelic she sounds.
Her cover outdoes Puth's original vocals. While I like the original, I always felt something was missing. Well, that something missing is there in Jasmine's rendition. Her rendition gets to the emotional core of the song in a way that Puth's rendition does not.
While both renditions are emotionally powerful, the tender, ethereal quality of Jasmine's rendition take the song to another level of aesthetic beauty and poignancy. Her angelic vocals are perfectly fitting to a song about seeing a lost loved again in the next life, in that realm of the heavens.
Speaking of heavenly, my absolute favorite part of the song is when Jasmine sings, "So let the light guide your way." My chills got chills hearing her sing that line.
As I said in the opening paragraph, it would have been amazing if Jasmine had been tapped to sing the original with Wiz Khalifa. The contrast between Jasmine's evocative vocals and Wiz's rhythmic rapping would have turned a good song into a great one. To prove my point, someone with video editing skills should take Jasmine's version and add Wiz Khalifa's rapping to create a duet between the two. In my opinion, the result would be astonishingly good.
Fantastic work from Jasmine.