NO ORDINARY JOE Joe Jonas, the soft-spoken frontman of pop music’s zaniest band of misfits, talks about new music, finding his voice, and why the typical post-boy-band career path just isn’t for him. By OUSSAMA ZAHR
Photography by DENNIS LEUPOLD
Joe Jonas can trace the turning point of his career to a single piece of advice that led to the creation of DNCE, the funk-infused dance-rock band that seemed to emerge, fully formed, from an explosion at a disco-dust factory in 2015. “I’ll never forget the conversation I had with my manager,” says Jonas. “He was like, ‘You need to get this band together, do what you want to do, and just go have fun.’” Judging by DNCE’s first single, the freewheeling dance-pop confection “Cake by the Ocean,” Jonas and his bandmates—bassist and keyboardist Cole Whittle, guitarist JinJoo Lee, and drummer Jack Lawless—took that decree dead seriously. The music video, directed by the creative team Black Coffee and Jonas’s then-girlfriend, supermodel Gigi Hadid, takes the song at its word. There is a massive, 12-foot-tall slice of cake—based on the strawberry-topped emoji cake, naturally—set up on a beach for a cake-fighting competition that seems to take its rules from dodgeball. A crowd of pretty young things in swimsuits gathers on makeshift risers. Social-media influencer Josh Ostrovsky, aka the Fat Jew, makes a slow-mo, Baywatch-style entrance looking like a gonzo sumo wrestler in tiny swim trunks, his ponytail sticking up from his head like an antenna. He faces off against a bevy of models and proceeds to clobber one after the other with cake and frosting as he dodges their volleys, graceful as a dancer. Someone in the crowd swipes through the dating app Bumble. Ostrovsky pours White Girl rosé all over himself. The members of DNCE bounce around antically on a bandstand. The entire enterprise is so self-aware and fluent in millennial culture that it practically defies criticism—it’s too in on the joke. Even the name of the song is a goof: Swedish producers Mattman & Robin kept confusing “sex on the beach” with “cake by the ocean” in the studio, and the band ran with it all the way to the top of Billboard’s Adult Pop charts and a win at the MTV Video Music Awards for Best New Artist. With a fun and fresh new album, the self-titled DNCE, and a 2017 calendar filling up with headlining tour dates, the 27-year-old Jonas is
32 GOTHAM-MAGAZINE.COM
coming into his own, but it took some time for him and his eventual bandmates to arrive at DNCE’s impetuous, carefree style. Joe and his brothers Nick and Kevin found fame as the Disney Channel-assisted boy band the Jonas Brothers, and tapped into that unstoppable force known as preteen- and teen-girl fandom, which rises like a wave every 10 years or so to carry bands of young men to stardom. The story of the group’s breakup, in 2013, is well known, with Nick, the youngest brother in the group, initiating it. “It was startling at first,” recalls Jonas. “I needed a week or two to process it. It was such an important changeover for me. I felt like it was time for us to hang up the hat, but we were holding on to it for so long.” For his part, Nick seemed very ready to move on, and he swiftly found success as a solo artist. “I’m envious at times, watching his artistry and how he went so quickly into creating music and an album,” Jonas admits. “But I also knew that it was important to take time for myself to be able to figure out what exactly I wanted to do next. It’s so easy to just jump right into something and release more music, and it might not be the right fit. Now we’re able to support each other from afar.” Jonas is speaking from experience: He had already tried out the solo thing himself with the album Fastlife (2011) while the Jonas Brothers were on hiatus in 2010/2011. While it was a respectable pop/R&B effort, the album didn’t exactly break new ground, and it passed under the pop radar. “I’m very proud of the music that I was able to create,” Jonas says, “but I think at the time it was a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it came to making the music. I look back now, and I’m glad I went through that, because I would be in the same position [now] that I was then, where I’d be trying to go the Justin Timberlake route. It wasn’t what I felt most comfortable doing. I always loved being in a band surrounded by great musicians and people that love it as much as me, and being able to perform onstage with a group of friends and have a blast. That’s at the core of what DNCE has been for the last two years—just pure fun for us.”
