So How Exactly Are the Jonas Brothers Going to Play 5 Albums Every Night?

Nearly two decades into their careers, Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas are embarking on the most ambitious Jonas Brothers tour yet, and over the weekend they kicked it off with two sold-out shows at Yankee Stadium. The band, fronted by the brothers and rounded out by an ecosystem of collaborators and touring musicians, was joined by a few special guests, including Jimmy Fallon, who led the crowd in a rendition of The Killers’ “Mr. Brightside” during the intermission of Sunday’s show.

The tour is coming off the group’s newest release, The Album, a collection of songs playfully referencing ’70s and ’80s music and cowritten and produced by Jon Bellion. But with an eye toward the band’s deep fan base, every night’s show will also include nearly all the songs from its four most loved albums, starting from 2007’s Jonas Brothers. Ever since the band’s 2019 reunion, Jonas Brothers shows have included the group’s biggest hits from the Disney Channel days. But earlier this year, during a five-night run of Broadway shows, the musicians discovered a new appreciation for the deep cuts, which sound even more timeless now that pop punk is a lingua franca uniting artists in rock, rap, and country. The brothers, now in their 30s, were teenagers when they wrote their early albums, but with time, it’s become clear that the Jonas Brothers helped shape a generation with their brand of hook-focused power pop featuring catchy guitar riffs and sly asides.

“The show is really something special,” Kevin told Vanity Fair in a recent interview. “It’s a journey through our lives so far, you know? It’s cool to see people that know all of our music and fans that are on the newer side experience all this, this journey of our lives together.”

Before the weekend, the brothers sat down to explain the logic behind taking a trip down memory lane and revisiting five albums in one night. As Kevin himself noted on Twitter earlier this summer, it’s so many songs. If you add in all the other must-plays, it’s about 67. But they’ve managed to get it down to about three hours, and it’s a show that’s engaging for hardcore and casual fans alike.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Vanity Fair: You’re fitting so much music into one night. Were you thinking about doing it chronologically, Taylor Swift Eras-style? Or a bit more like what Beyoncé is doing with Renaissance, blending new and old thematically?

Joe Jonas: It’s a blend of all of those things. We know that we’re going to have a lot of newer fans coming to the show, as well as the OG fans who know the earlier albums. So we have the new album spaced throughout the set. We also have a lot of songs that were not necessarily part of albums—singles or songs from our individual projects—so we have a lot to play with. We wanted to build a really theatrical show that takes you on a musical, emotional journey if you’re a fan or not. We wanted to create a space where you’re just happy to be there, almost like the DJs up there mixing songs together. There’s a lot of medleys, because we can’t fit all of every song. What was the word we came up with for them?