Jonas Brothers Tell All About The Band's Breakup and Reunion

Eric Ray Davidson

In a little more than 48 hours, Saturday Night Live guest host Emma Thompson will say this triumphantly, on TV, before millions, sounding as if she’s summoning a reanimated woolly mammoth from the arctic ice. What’s happening today in New York is a sneak preview: a dress rehearsal, for a handful of friends and family, on the iconic stage of Studio 8H, where the last great boy band of the aughts made its first and only appearance a decade ago.

Here they are, once more, handsomely returned in the flesh:

Joe! Kevin! Nick!

Plus: balloons. So many balloons. The Jonas Brothers are surrounded by 3,500 balloons in total, inflated as stage props. It makes the trio look trapped inside a gumball machine, or the aftermath of Ryan Seacrest’s New Year’s Eve countdown.

“Can we get some more balloons, please?” Joe Jonas says, deadpan, surveying the scene.

“Just a few more,” says Nick Jonas.

There are chuckles in the small audience, which includes the Jonas parents, Kevin Sr. and Denise, as well as Kevin Jr.’s growing family: his wife, Danielle, and daughters, Alena, 5, and Valentina, 2. By Saturday, the ranks will include Nick’s wife of six months, the actress and singer Priyanka Chopra, as well as Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner—Sansa Stark herself—whom Joe married days ago in Las Vegas, with an Elvis impersonator serving as the officiant, Diplo stepping in as the (unsolicited) videographer, and Ring Pops standing in for wedding bands.

“We had to do a legal marriage before we did a real big one,” Joe explains to me during a rehearsal break. Details are closely guarded, but the “real big one” is rumored to be happening later this year, in Europe, so the couple needed to get a stateside union on the books first. “It was either the courthouse, or our version, and I preferred our version,” Joe says. “Friends, Elvis, and Ring Pops.”

Not long after the Vegas nuptials, a Ring Pop wrapper allegedly discarded by Joe Jonas sold on eBay for $2,900, which speaks to the Jonas mania that lingers. On Friday, there will be JoBros fans camping on the street to score SNL tickets, like they did back in 2009, when they needed to convince mom or dad to camp out with them too. In the coming weeks, the Jonases will announce extra dates for a North American concert tour, as well as shows in Europe. A documentary chronicling the band’s comeback, Chasing Happiness, arrived on Amazon Prime Video on June 4, and an album, Happiness Begins, drops June 7.

That’s right. Once more, your life is about to be totally Jonas’d.

“It’s surreal, being able to do this again,” Kevin Jonas says.

At rehearsal, there’s a detectable I can’t believe this is happening vibe, because, well, nobody can believe this is happening. Left behind in the yearbook pages of early 21st-century pop culture, alongside Myspace and High School Musical, the Jonas Brothers have reassembled, reemerged, and the hate-everything public of 2019 is...thrilled. At the moment, the trio is riding the biggest hit single they’ve ever had: “Sucker,” an addictive funk-falsetto number that has been earwormed inside my auditory cortex for months.

“‘Sucker’ is a big piece of the puzzle,” Nick Jonas says, noting the song’s appeal to people warming to the band for the first time. “It felt like the perfect step out.”

On Nick: Calvin Luo jacket/pants and boots; on Joe: Calvin Luo jacket, pants, white Gucci loafers, leisure society optical, David Yurman ring; on Kevin: Calvin Luo jacket and pants, yellow top, David Yurman necklace and ring, Aquatalia brown boots

“Sucker" is indeed a banger, and delivering brand-new Jonas admirers. But there’s nostalgia at play too. Those superfans who were preteens when the band first blossomed? They’re now in their 20s, liquor legal, and as jazzed as their parents once were about the Eagles dusting off their guitars. It’s a bit jarring to see the Jonai discussed like grizzled, prodigal rockers—they really haven’t been gone that long—but everything about modern life has accelerated, including the ripening of memories into nostalgia. People are warm and fuzzy for their old flip phones, for crying out loud. The Hills is back on MTV. Of course there’s a soft spot for the Jonas Brothers.

Their timing appears impeccable. Jannine Lasaleta, a Yeshiva University assistant professor of marketing who studies nostalgia, says the strongest form of nostalgia is for events that occur in early adolescent life. A Jonas Brothers comeback “is hitting a sweet spot,” the professor tells me. She’s not saying this speculatively. Lasaleta’s own college students can’t stop talking about Jonas Brothers.

“They’re just as excited about it as they were 10 years ago,” Lasaleta says. “And now they have money to spend.”

This time last year, no one on Planet Jonas would have comfortably predicted this. When the Jonases broke up in 2013, the JoBros frenzy had diminished to a whisper, and the wheels had been spinning off for a while. An episode of South Park had mocked the band as hapless stooges of Disney’s Mickey Mouse. In the Amazon doc, Nick worries he’s a has-been—at age 21.

That’s not even the worst part. The Jonas breakup, initiated by Nick, caused a painful fracture in the brothers' relationship. Where there was once an inseparable bond, there were curdled feelings of resentment. The end of Jonas Brothers hadn’t been just business. It was personal, because it was family.

“Being back with the Jonas Brothers? I truly never thought it would happen,” Kevin says. “Like, ever. When that chapter closed, it closed. I put that book on the shelf.”

Joe agrees. “I was like, ‘I’m not doing this again.”

Nick, as he often does, gets straight to the point: “Right after the band split up, I didn’t know if we would ever speak again.”

This is the part where I remind you that there was a moment, not long ago, when Jonas Brothers were one of the biggest bands in the world. At their apex, they had three albums in the Billboard Top 10 at the same time. The Jonases had a hit movie on the Disney Channel, Camp Rock, as well as a goofy hit TV show, Jonas, and they inhabited a candy-colored universe with friends like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Demi Lovato, and Selena Gomez. Their biggest fans included Sasha and Malia Obama, for whom the Jonases played a private concert at the White House in 2009. (President Obama later joked that the Jonas Brothers shouldn’t “get any ideas,” or he’d wipe them out with predator drones.)

I saw a lot of this. In 2008, I was assigned to follow the band for a cover story for Rolling Stone magazine. I witnessed the mania, the shows, the fans, and the fan parents fiercely determined to get their children a backstage meet-and-greet with the band. The Jonas ascension was head-spinning—in just two years, this family band from New Jersey, the sons of a pastor, had gone from rumbling around in a van playing all-ages shows to flying in private jets and selling out arenas around the world.

Back then, the Jonases were under the Disney mothership, and tightly managed. Their image was squeaky clean—remember the frenzy surrounding the brothers’ purity rings, said to symbolize a vow of chastity before marriage?—and fiercely protected, especially when it came to revealing their romantic interests. It’s an old formula: teen stars instructed to airbrush their real lives, especially their love lives, so as not to alienate their audience. Rumors (Joe and Taylor! Nick and Miley! Nick and Selena!) were coyly flicked away. The secrecy made sense...kind of. In retrospect, it was an enormous amount of pressure to put on teenagers who just wanted to be teenagers.

Today, things are much different. Freer. Looser. A hang with the Jonas Brothers may involve a few drinks—it does a few hours after the SNL rehearsal, at New York’s swanky Edition hotel, where the trio have commandeered a corner table in an upstairs bar. Kevin, now 31, is enjoying a beer, and when Nick, 26, and Joe, 29, arrive, he orders tequila—until Joe waves him off for a pair of Aperol spritzes. There’s a brief discussion of a recent New York Times story that slammed the Aperol spritz as a terrible drink. “I highly disagree,” Joe says. Snacks are summoned. Nick orders caviar, sounding like a man who knows how to order caviar.

I am very much enjoying this older version of the Jonas Brothers.

They look basically the same. There’s been a rakish style upgrade—for the “Sucker” single cover, they look like they’re on their way to a yacht party in Sardinia—but the hair and complexion gods remain generous to the Jonases. Nick’s added a layer of buff muscle, something that traces back to his role as a cage fighter in the mixed-martial arts TV drama Kingdom. I am happy to report Kevin and Joe are no longer flat-ironing their bangs. Nor does Joe have to take out a razor and shave during his lunch breaks, as he was forced to do during tapings of Jonas.

“I was playing a 14-year-old, growing a beard,” says Joe.

“He had five o’clock shadow!” Nick says.

ERIC RAY DAVIDSON

Yes, the Jonas Brothers are just as amused at their old boy-band selves as you are. They’re charmingly self-aware, in fact.

“I love that we're all in a place where we can laugh at ourselves,” Nick says. “We don't take ourselves too seriously. We can acknowledge that we were once a little robotic and uncool. Now we’re just plain uncool—and we’re okay with that.”

“We’re livin’ that life,” Kevin says, raising his glass.

In the old days, it wasn’t like this. In the old days, the Jonas Brothers spent a lot of time being freaked out. Joe tells me he always had a pervasive fear that a misstep—even something as innocuous as a girlfriend—could derail their careers.

“We’d flinch if you asked about dating and things like that,” Joe says. “We were so scared. We felt like something was going to take it down at any minute.”

At the table, I ask about those purity rings, and if it was awkward—all those questions about them, if they indeed represented a vow of abstinence.

“The very simple answer is that it was incredibly annoying,” Nick says. “And then it became a defining factor of who we were as a band, which was disappointing. I was just trying to navigate love, and romance, and what sex even meant to me, at a sensitive age.

“The question should have been: Is it appropriate for people to talk about a 16-year-old’s sex life? It’s absolutely not—and it wouldn’t necessarily fly today.”

“It definitely wouldn’t,” says Joe.

Nick continues: “Once I got older, and I experienced love, and had sex, and defined my view of the world, and what faith and religion actually meant to me, I accepted that [the rings] were probably a fascinating story to people. In the same way, the South Park episode [which ridiculed the rings] is incredibly entertaining. I accept that it made some people curious and laugh. It doesn’t define us now. That’s what matters.”

If it sounds like Nick is mad, he’s not. He and the Jonas Brothers are too old to care anymore. Besides, the landscape is different now. These days, pop idols don’t bother with secrecy—it’s all about authenticity, being real and open.

“That's why everyone loves Cardi B so much,” says Joe. “She's the queen right now, because she is so brutally honest on her Instagram, whether it’s about herself, or others, or politics. She's a badass. I think people respond to that way more than they do any kind of mystery.”

On models: Dior dress, Santoni sandals; Givenchy dress, Chloé sunglasses; Bevza dress, Oscar de la Renta necklace; Chloé top, jacket and pants; Chanel dress, Chanel earrings, Ancient Greek Sandals.

When the Jonas Brothers wound down, they wound down hard. By the turn of the decade, the band was having trouble selling tickets and records. Determined to find a way back, they walled themselves off from others, tried to make music, strategize and recalibrate. Nothing really worked.

“At some point [the band] got so dysfunctional that we didn’t even let in outside writers,” Joe says. “We didn’t have a producer. We didn’t have a label. We were like, ‘We’re good with this.’ Not to speak of memes, but it was like that dog and the burning house: ‘This is fine.’”

“Which meme?” Nick asks.

“It’s a dog in a burning house,” Joe says, helpfully. “He’s a smiling cartoon dog, and he’s like, ‘This is fine.’ That was us.”

“I love that you just referenced a meme in an interview,” Nick says.

“It’s a very popular meme, Nick,” Joe says.

Despite the struggles and slowing sales, the breakup came as a shock—at least to Joe and Kevin.

“It was like, ‘You’re joking,’” says Joe. “And then it was like, ‘Fuck this. And fuck you guys. I’m going to go figure out what’s next for me and this will never happen again.’”

Joe took a long while to recover from the breakup. “Wounded” is the word he uses. Joe would wind up finding success as the frontman for the band DNCE, whose massive 2015 hit, “Cake by the Ocean,” is still on heavy rotation at weddings and bar mitzvahs near you. In 2016, he met his future bride, Turner, the old-fashioned way—via Instagram DM. He proposed to her a year later.

Still, the pain over the Jonas Brothers breakup lingered, Joe says. “I couldn’t even play one of our songs on stage with DNCE...even just to nod to the past,” he says.

Joe credits Turner’s healthy relationship with her own family for pushing him toward fixing his.

“It encouraged me to see she had such a great relationship with her brothers,” he says. “That was really a big thing for me to be able to look at, and say, ‘I gotta get my shit together.’”

After the jolt, Kevin devoted himself to family life. He and Danielle had already moved to New Jersey and done two seasons of reality television with the E! show Married to Jonas. He says he dabbled in marketing, investing, even real estate. Other than the occasional YouTube video, his kids had no idea of their dad’s former career as a pop star. “They didn’t know who that Kevin was,” he says.

Nick, meanwhile, pushed further into acting and a solo music career that included hits like “Jealous” and “Chains.” But his relations with his brothers needed repair. The Chasing Happiness documentary alludes to Nick’s controlling style, and how he was the one who pushed for the breakup.

I ask Nick if he felt vilified as the Jonas who ended the band.

“I felt guilty for having been so honest,” he says. “But I was also aware that that was absolutely what needed to be done.”

Over time, however, Nick says he began to see his brothers’ side of the situation. “I could have done a better job of communicating the way I felt,” he says. “I’d had a month or two to live with this decision I’d made, and they hadn’t.”

The trio’s reconciliation is covered in Chasing Happiness, which the Jonases—who were tentatively speaking to each other but were far from hunky-dory—say they began filming last year as an experiment in whether or not they could reconnect. In one scene, the three drink tequila and play a truth-or-dare-style game in which the breakup is revisited and remediated. Pointed feelings come out, but eventually give way to affection, and finally, making music.

“I think we’d forgotten what it was like to work with each other,” Nick says.

In the film, there’s only a brief reference to the biggest recent event in Nick’s life: his whirlwind romance with Chopra, a.k.a “Pri,” the 36-year-old Indian cinema superstar and former Miss World who was partly-raised in the U.S. and also starred in the ABC drama, Quantico. The couple’s epic December wedding in India was a celebrity wedding for the ages, a genuine global news story.

Nick’s debonair, Clooney-like ease with mega-famousness surprises me. When I met him 11 years ago, Nick was clearly preternaturally talented, but he also seemed like the kind of kid who could happily leave stardom behind and live on a farm.

“There was a part of me that thought that too,” Nick admits.

“There were times when he showed me many farms,” says Kevin.

“Nick still shows us listings of farms,” says Joe. “He’ll say, ‘There’s this one in Pennsylvania,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’”

Nick smiles. “Certainly the person I ended up falling in love with and marrying is very famous and successful and all of that,” he says. “I couldn’t have predicted that would happen, that life would take me down that path. The fact that she’d been working in this business for as long as I have, we could relate on that. I’m grateful to have found the right person.”

So...is the Nick Jonas farm fantasy still in play?

“The farm is very much in play,” Nick says. “She loves the idea.”

The Jonas revival is taking off, and close to home, there is joy. “I never dreamed they would get back together as a band,” says Denise Jonas, their mother. Dad Kevin Sr. says he never fully closed the door, but “it looked like it was closed.”

For Joe, Nick, and Kevin, the breakout success of “Sucker,” and concert sellouts have delivered an odd sense of relief.

“It felt like the appetite was out there,” Nick says. “That didn’t mean it would be easy. I’ve been saying, over and over, ‘I’m so glad it worked. By no means can we hang out and ride the wave. We’re going to have to keep pushing. But this could have gone terribly wrong. We’re grateful the pieces came together.”

The Happiness Begins Tour kicks off August 7 in Miami. The band is planning to play their new songs and the vintage stuff too, like their old hit “Burnin’ Up,” which they wind up doing as a surprise on SNL. (Nick says they’re happy to play the oldies, though they might avoid Disney covers like “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” from The Little Mermaid.)

Eric Ray Davidson

The Jonases also want a relaxed vibe on tour. If Kevin needs time to be with Danielle and the kids, so be it. Same with Nick and Pri, or Joe and Sophie. The three Jonas spouses, who refer to themselves as the “J Sisters,” have already become formidable roadies, showing up via private jet to cheer the band at a surprise concert at a Penn State bar in April, then dancing as a trio at the Billboard Awards in May, creating a whole new level of intrigue around the band.

“We’re doing this because we want to,” says Joe. “That means we want to do it our way, and not get worked to the bone either.” The group’s longtime manager, Phil McIntyre, agrees. “This time around, we’re stopping and smelling the roses.”

The woolly mammoth has been reanimated. The Jonas Brothers may not have expected this comeback to happen, but that only makes it sweeter. At the SNL rehearsal, as the band plays among the many, many balloons, Kevin’s two children, the first Jonas grandkids, quietly bop in their seats. This is new: Alena and Valentina have never seen their father play with their uncles. It makes me think of the very last line of the story I wrote about the Jonas Brothers, more than a decade ago, when they were on top of the world, that it looked “like the time of their lives.” I was wrong. This is.

Photography & Director, Eric Ray Davidson; Video Director, Robert Dumé; Writer: Anthony DiMieri; DP, Danny Dwyer; Digital Design by Perri Tomkiewicz; Motion Graphics by Hayeon Kim; Styling by Avo Yermagyan; Fashion Director, Kerry Pieri; Model Styling by Tennille Yamashita; Grooming by Marissa Machado; Models, Cami Taylor, Lili Johnson, Natalie Brown, Rachel Tabb, & Impy Lukkarila; Extras Glam by Lavonne Anthony; Production by Michelle Junket for Crawford & Co; Bookings by Nojan Aminosharei; Executive Director, Joyann King; Special Thanks to Luxury Retreats

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Jason Gay is the sports columnist at the Wall Street Journal, where he has worked since 2009. In 2015, he was a finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor, for his debut book, Little Victories. He has seen more than several Jonas Brothers concerts. 

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