Jenna Lea Rosen has gone back to the animated songbook again, this time singing “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail with an off-screen pianist backing her. She framed the post as an open invitation, asking her followers “who remembers this beautiful song from an american tail?” and tagging both Linda Ronstadt and animator Don Bluth.
The song carries a genuine pedigree. Written by James Horner, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil for the 1986 Don Bluth feature, “Somewhere Out There” was recorded as a duet by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram and climbed all the way to number two on the Billboard Hot 100. It is a song about separation and hope built for two voices reaching toward each other across an impossible distance, which makes hearing the whole thing carried by one voice a genuine curiosity.
Rosen has been doing this for years, and she has been asking that same question the whole time. Back in January 2022, Trevor Decker News covered her cover of “Soon” from the 1994 film Thumbelina, a video she opened by asking her followers almost word for word whether they remembered the song. In the comments of that post she told them she was planning to record more throwback songs from animated classics. She was not bluffing. A year later, TDN covered her performance of “I Belong” from Sofia the First, a song that earned an Emmy nomination for composer John Kavanaugh in 2014 and one that Rosen has a direct personal claim to, having sung for multiple characters on the series.
That last detail is what separates her from most of the performers filling this niche on TikTok. Rosen is not an outsider paying tribute to animation. She has voiced more than thirty animated characters for Disney and HBO, including work on Elena of Avalor, Fancy Nancy, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, DuckTales, and Alice’s Wonderland Bakery. She played Elsa in Theatre Under The Stars’ production of Frozen in Houston, and she performed “Let It Go” with a seventy-five piece orchestra in Taiwan for Disney Music. When she covers a song from an animated film, she is working from inside the tradition rather than looking in at it.
She is also doing this during one of the busiest stretches of her career. Rosen has spent the past year on the first national tour of Suffs, Shaina Taub’s Tony-winning musical about the American suffrage movement, appearing in the ensemble while understudying both Alice Paul and Doris Stevens. The tour recouped its investment after twenty-eight playing weeks and has played to well over 375,000 people, and it is now in its final stretch before closing on August 9. Squeezing in a casual TikTok in the middle of that schedule says something about how much these songs still matter to her.
None of this is a production. It is a phone video shot in a plain room with an accompanist out of frame, closer to someone singing along at home than anything staged, and that is most of the appeal. The Thumbelina and Sofia covers gave a big, trained theater voice material that could take it. This one asks for something quieter, and hearing it handled loosely rather than polished into a produced single is what makes it worth the two minutes. Rosen has spent a decade filling rooms. This is what she sounds like when she is not trying to.
You can follow Rosen on TikTok at @jennalearosen for more, and An American Tail remains available to stream.
