When my coworkers found out that I, a man in my late 20s, had volunteered to write about the Jonas Brothers concert at Nationwide Arena, they gave me slightly amused and befuddled expressions.
“I thought Jonas Brothers fans were mostly girls?” they asked me.
To them, I say only a fool would deny the charm of the JoBros.
I was an elementary school student when the Jonas Brothers took the world by storm in the late 2000s, so I grew up watching and listening to them. And yes, elementary school students from the 2000s are now old enough to write in newspapers. They even pay me!
Back then, unlike my peers of the opposite sex who seemed to mostly want to smooch the Jonas Brothers, I wanted to be the Jonas Brothers. This was down to two simple reasons:
They were rock stars (cool), and they were on The Disney Channel (frankly, the only channel that mattered to me). When I heard we were looking for someone to write about their Columbus concert, I jumped at the chance to please my inner child, the child who once received a Jonas Brothers album for Christmas and spent countless hours watching “Camp Rock.”
So, yes, it is cool and normal and good for me to write this story. In fact, if you're a late-20s man who denies you like the Jonas Brothers, I ask you this: Why did you kill the part of you that feels joy?
Anyways, here are some takeaways from the brothers' night at Nationwide Arena.
Those boys still got it
For the unaware, the Jonas Brothers' current tour, The Burning Up All Over Again Tour, is a revival of their 2008 The Burning Up Tour that occurred at the height of Jonas Brothers mania. For those keeping track, 2008 was 18 years ago. The three teenage heartthrobs of Joe, Kevin and Nick are now grown men in their mid-to-late 30s with children of their own.
From what pop culture and people older than me have told me, once you turn 30 your body crumples in on itself like a collapsing building, and your youth hails a taxi, gives you a grim wave and leaves forever. If that's really what happens, the Jonas Brothers didn't show it in Nationwide Arena.
The three guys are as energetic and charming as ever. Joe still has the audience eating out of his hand with his roguish good looks and swagger, Nick can still hit high notes and pluck heart strings, and Kevin is still the backbone of the whole thing. All three of the brothers perform with a practiced ease that clearly comes from them being on stage since they were children. Their whole performance was slick and effortless; these are pop and rock stars still at the peak of their powers.
The concert was divided into two chunks, first their retro hits from the 2000s, an intermission and then all their more contemporary music. During the first half, the nostalgia for their huge hits like "Play My Music" was so thick in the air you could almost reach out and grab it. I watched a sea of human bodies on the floor beneath me sway and writhe with every note, their faces lit up with joy.
The second half of the concert, where they played more modern hits like Joe's band DNCE's 2015 hit "Cake by the Ocean" and the brothers' 2019 reunion single "Sucker" was more like a dance party. At the end of "Sucker," the final song of the night, the brothers came to the edge of the stage and took a bow. As they walked back, confetti cannons shot into the crowd.
Jonas Brothers fandom as strong as ever
After all these years, I foolishly thought that Jonas Brothers fever would maybe have subsided a bit. And while it may have lain dormant for a few years in the 2010s when the band was broken up, it’s clear from the crowd at Nationwide that Jonas Brothers fever remains endemic.
Every second they were on stage, almost everyone in the audience was on their feet. The crowd rolled and danced and sang along to every song. For the Jonas Brothers’ biggest hits like “S.O.S.” and “Burnin’ Up,” Nationwide Arena shook with the force of thousands of people jumping up and down.
Looking around me, it was clear that love of the Jonas Brothers had become a generational affair for some families. I saw parents not much older than I am with kids of their own perched on their shoulders, hoping to draw the attention of one of the brothers. I saw older women with what looked to be their adult daughters.
My prognosis: Jonas Brothers fever is communicable among family members and appears to be uncurable. Maybe 18 years from now, we'll all still be "Burnin' Up" for them.
Transportation and neighborhoods reporter Nathan Hart can be reached at NHart@dispatch.com, @NathanRHart on X and nathanhart.dispatch.com on Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: I'm a grown man who saw the Jonas Brothers in Columbus. No regrets | Review
