The Jonas Brothers have racked up a lifetime of memories during their two decades on stage and screen together. As they gear up for the final push of shows on their celebratory Jonas20: Greetings From Your Hometown tour, Nick, Joe and Kevin sat down with Variety for a look back at the high, lows and curveballs in their 20 year career as a sibling band, including an early Grammy loss that stung at the time, but feels just about right in retrospect.
The trio — who will be honored with a handprint and footprint ceremony at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on Wednesday (Dec. 3), adding their imprints to the other stars in cement in front of the theater in honor of their 20th anniversary — recalled their nomination for best new artist at the 2009 Grammy Awards. Though they said they were honored just to be nominated, even after all this time the trio admitted that losing out to Adele made perfect sense.
“Of all the people to lose to, that’s just fine,” Nick said, with Joe adding, “she’s the right person to lose to.” The group has still not won a Grammy, but Nick said seeing multi-generational families coming out to their shows is “the best part” of their longevity as a group.
The look back was filled with some fun, silly memories, including one about the New Jersey-bred trio’s first trip to Hollywood as teens, where their management company took them on a ride around town in a rented Mini Cooper as they shouted along to Weezer’s “Beverly Hills.”
“We were listening to Weezer’s album,” Joe recalled. “We were singing, ‘Beverly Hills, that’s where I want to be.’ We were like, ‘We’re going to do this. We’re going to be out here, we’re going to make it out here.’” Though they were dropped by Columbia Records after releasing their debut album (2006’s It’s About Time), Disney’s Hollywood Records scooped them up and release three hit albums and two Camp Rock TV movies that turned the trio into pop superstars.
It was a heady time, with Joe dating fellow pop stars Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato and Nick dating Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, even as the public was laser-focused on the purity rings the brothers wore, which they insisted at the time meant they were saving themselves for marriage. “There was a lot of interest in our sexual life during our teenage years, which was odd,” Joe said of the scrutiny of their teen sex lives that Nick labeled “very inappropriate.”
And then, to their fans’ shock, they broke up in 2013, a split Kevin said he thought they would “never” return from. Though Kevin was about to welcome his first child with wife Danielle, he quickly realized that sitting on the couch “doing nothing for hours, days” was spiraling him into depression and anxiety as the brothers pursued their own solo careers. They did, of course, get back together in 2019 to release the single “Sucker,” which debuted at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, giving them their first chart-topper.
After the massive anniversary tour and release of their Greetings From Your Hometown album in August, as well as the November debut of their holiday movie, A Very Jonas Christmas, Nick said it’s been a “wonderful year to celebrate this journey with the fans and with each other. To be family that not only is able to continue to, but to actually enjoy it and to be doing new things this far into our career, like the Christmas movie and other things — it’s a really meaningful thing for us. I feel like we’re in our favorite chapter of our journey.”
Reflecting on the most difficult part of their journey, Joe said it’s professional, but also personal. “We are a band, but we’re also a band of biological brothers. I think with a band breaking up, it arguably hits way harder than a normal band breaking up because Thanksgiving dinner might be a little bit more awkward than most,” he said, noting that somehow they pushed through by leaning on each other for support.
They also recalled their first red carpet, at the Kid’s Choice Awards, where they huddled beforehand and decided to mimic a carpet trick employed by bands such as Green Day, Blink-182 and the Backstreet Boys and stick their tongues out in every picture. “We were young,” Nick said.
Asked what they would tell their younger selves given what they know now, Nick said he’d counsel them, “just to take a little pressure off. I think we came up in a time — our work with Disney — and obviously, demographics of that being primarily a younger audience, teens, so there’s this real pressure to be a role model, to be an example. I think back when we would’ve said, ‘Oh, we love that. We don’t mind the pressure. We’re trying to be good guys.’ I think as a 33-year-old, talking to my 13-year-old self, I’d say, ‘Hey, don’t try to carry the world on your shoulders. If you just need to be a kid growing up, going through experiences, do that.’”
With so many achievements under their belts, the trio are not done yet. Nick said they’d love to go “full circle” and work with fellow Jersey native Bruce Springsteen, while Kevin is interested in hitting the studio with producer/songwriter Mark Ronson and Joe has his eye on working with veteran producer Rick Rubin.
As for the next generation of Jonases, Nick thinks his four-year-old daughter with wife Priyanka Chopra, Malti, could have the genes, but the couple are determined to take it slow. “[She] loves music and she loves to sing, but I think we’re going to be very patient and make sure she is teed up for emotional success as well as other success by way of how we parent her,” he said. “If she wants to pursue a career in music or acting, then of course we’ll be supportive of whatever she wants to do. We want to see her thrive.”
The JoBros will be back on stage on Wednesday night at the Intrust Bank Arena in Wichita, Kan. and wind down their anniversary tour on Dec. 20 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
