February 28th, 2008Jonas brothers savvy about their music
Indeed they are. When the young musical trio rolls into the Fox Theatre for a pair of shows on Saturday, they’ll arrive riding a wave of explosive buzz — the sort of shriek-saturated hype made familiar by so many of their teen-pop predecessors.
And it’s only primed to get bigger: Last month, fresh off a breakout national tour with fellow Disney sensation Miley Cyrus (”Hannah Montana”), the group signed a multimillion-dollar touring deal with Live Nation that will put the brothers into more than 140 concert venues in the year ahead. The Jonases’ own Disney Channel series will debut this summer, along with a feature film called “Camp Rock.”
Signs that the brothers’ pop-star fantasy was transforming into big-time reality were obvious in December at the Palace, where the trio’s opening set elicited screams nearly as piercing as those for headliner Cyrus.
“It’s been an amazing journey the last couple of years,” says Kevin Jonas, 20, who as the eldest of the brothers serves as the de facto spokesman. He modestly recalls the group’s pre-poster-boy days, slogging away on promo tours through small clubs and amusement parks to play for listless crowds of several dozen people.
The brothers are still young enough to gush wide-eyed over the “couple of” Bruce Springsteen concerts they’ve attended, and to gleefully make Wiffle ball the backstage pastime of choice. But the New Jersey-bred Jonases — Kevin, Joe, 18, and Nick, 15 — are also wise beyond their years: three articulate guys, seemingly solid and well-grounded, carefully groomed under the tutelage of such music-biz veterans as John Fields and Steve Greenberg, who once guided Hanson along this same path.
That ’90s pop trio is frequently referenced by Jonas Brothers observers, perhaps more often than this threesome would like. But it fits. With their nods to vintage rock, their classic guitar-drums-bass setup, the Jonases have far more in common with the Hanson brothers than they do with the dance-pop groups — ‘N Sync, Backstreet Boys — who came in between.
“We think it’s really cool that we’re able to introduce, sort of, rock ‘n’ roll to our younger fans,” says Nick Jonas. “Even the parents get into it because it does sound like the things that they used to listen to when they were young. And, you know, we just really try to find really great music, and write songs like the really great music that we’re listening to. Because people love good music.”
For the Jonas Brothers, that means citing such touchstones as the Beatles and Prince when discussing the sound of their third album, recorded in part on their tour bus last year and scheduled for release in July. And it means learning their way through the catalog of Brit-pop icon Elvis Costello, whose “(I Don’t Want to Go To) Chelsea” was recently added to the Jonases’ live set list.
It’s another raising of the bar on the group’s headlining theater tour, which kicked off Jan. 31 in Arizona. The group has also tinkered with its own songs, toying with the arrangements and integrating new sounds into familiar material.
“You might hear something and not recognize it right away, but then all of a sudden realize that it’s a song we’ve been playing for five years now,” says Kevin Jonas. “Our fans will have a whole other way of listening to it.”
The brothers say they’re carefully heeding the advice of seasoned industry veterans, eager to avoid the personal pitfalls that have tripped up so many while navigating the fame game. And they respond patiently when confronted with the question that’s been posed to probably every young pop sensation in the half-century history of rock: Can you endure beyond flash-in-the-pan status?
“We would love to be a band that really does last,” says Joe Jonas. “And because we’re brothers, I think it really helps. Because we do write our own songs and we’re in the studio where they’re made, I think that will be a big part of it.”
“The fact is, we don’t want to ever be anything we’re not,” says Kevin Jonas, who describes the upcoming album as a natural evolution: “We grew up a little bit. We wrote some deeper songs and experimented with new instruments and things like that.
“So I think for us it’s really all about sticking to your fans and knowing that if you work with them, and play to them, then hopefully you’ll always be there.”
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