One week after their official return with “Sucker,” you’d expect Joe, Kevin, and Nick Jonas of the Jonas Brothers to be discussing their future ventures, but surprisingly, they’re doing the opposite: going back to the cause of their initial split and, perhaps more interestingly, identifying the actual culprit for the band's breakup.
Toward the end of the Jonas Brothers takeover week on The Late Late Show with James Corden, the siblings finally made their long-anticipated appearance on Carpool Karaoke and revealed it was actually Nick who broke up the band for good, back in the day.
Amid talking about their upcoming documentary and belting out classic JB gems like “Burnin' Up,” “When You Look Me in the Eyes,” and “Lovebug” (which Nick admitted he can’t wait to play live again soon), Corden subjected the trio to an actual lie-detector test (yes, in a car) to clear the air and dispel any “lingering doubts.”
During the test, Corden asked again if Nick had broken up the band (I mean, we needed the clarification), and it’s true: We have Nick to blame for the six-year JoBros hiatus, but also to thank for the reunion. “I broke the band up, but I got it back together,” Nick admitted to Corden in their car ride, with Kevin acknowledging, “it’s true; it’s a full redemptive story.”
During the full test, the brothers did not spare any details in answering Corden’s hard-hitting questions, including the most annoying part of Nick’s wedding ceremonies, brotherly rivalry, and their relationships with their brothers’ wives (and fiancée). Though some lies did make it through.
When asked if he was “a better singer than his brothers,” Nick went the humble route and answered with a rather doubtful “no,” which, obviously, turned out to be a lie. Kevin also lied about not “thinking of punching Nick because he split up the band.”
Once unplugged though, they kept spilling some tea, addressing the pressure they felt during their Disney days and how they all felt about their infamous purity rings.
“[The] purity rings were to wait for the right person when the time was right,” Joe explained to Corden. “And here’s the catch: When you are 12 and you do that — because we grew up in a church and our dad was a pastor — it kind of just came [naturally] for everyone to go through it, [to] get one and say, ‘I’m going to wait for the right person.’ Some people say, ‘I’ll wait until marriage.' [But] when you are about 15 or 16, you start dating and you go, ‘Wait a minute, what did I say I was gonna do?’”At this point, Joe looked at his ring finger jokingly.
Joe then admitted that the brothers did not initially intend to discuss the ring publicly, but felt it became necessary. “Of course you got three young boys wearing rings on their fingers so everyone was like, ‘Are they married already? What’s going on here?’” he told Corden. “We were in an interview one day, the guy asked about it, we were like, ‘We don’t talk about it,’ and he was like, ‘Well, I’m just going to say you’re in a cult.’ And we were like, ‘Weeell, we should probably...’” Joe teased when recounting the story.
After that story ran, the purity rings and the JB became a quasi-inseparable nexus, ultimately prompting the brothers’ decision to take them off. “That was what people ran with forever. It was a running joke and found the humor in it sometimes, but, of course, we just kind of decided at one point, ‘Look, this is not who we are,'" Joe revealed. "We don’t need to be wearing this anymore.”
And, if you were wondering who was the first brother to take the ring off, it was Kevin.
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