Climbing the Charts

Blame it on the flu.

Or perhaps "The View," both of which are known to cause stomach pain.

Feeling under the weather, Kevin Jonas took a break from school one day, and scads of teen girls would never be the same.

"I was sick at home, and I didn't want to watch daytime TV anymore," says the 20-year-old heartthrob. "So I picked up a teach-yourself-guitar book, and I've never put the guitar down since, six years later."

Flanked by his two siblings, Nick, 15, and Joe, 18, Kevin has turned that illness into a thriving family business.

With their eponymous sophomore album going platinum last year, The Jonas Brothers have shot up the charts like well-coiffed gunfire.

Driven by Nick's yearning, puppy dog voice, the group crafts starry-eyed power pop with their hearts permanently lodged in their throats. It's spurred more than 900,000 fans, mostly young girls, to leave wistful comments on the band's MySpace page.

"You're the light that makes my darkness disappear," Nick sings on their current ballad "When You Look Me in the Eyes," and you can practically hear an army of kid sisters sighing in the background as it plays.

Of course, the brothers have heard the inevitable Hanson comparisons.

"We're a lot different," Nick clarifies. "We have brown hair. And it's kind of shorter."

"And we're Italian," Joe chimes in.

Well, there you go.

But there are other, more substantial differences between the two radio-friendly trios, namely their influences. Despite their relatively young ages, the brothers profess a love of classic rock and pop staples such as Prince, fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello.

And it's not just name dropping: On The Jonas Brothers' current tour, they're playing a portion of Nick's favorite Costello song, "I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea."

It's a long way from the band's origins.

The group initially developed around Nick, who first started performing on Broadway at the age of 7 after being discovered by a talent manager while singing in a barbershop.

The group's first record, 2006's "About Time," stiffed, selling only around 50,000 copies and causing the band's label, Columbia, to drop them.

But after hooking up with the Disney-owned Hollywood Records, the brothers sold more than a million copies of their second record and have since become a priority for Disney, which has tapped the group for both a forthcoming movie, "Camp Rock," and their own TV series, "J.O.N.A.S.," in addition to a new album this summer.

After touring with fellow multimedium star Miley Cyrus last year, the brothers are being put forth as her male counterparts.

Whereas Cyrus is the precocious star who millions of teen girls want to be, the Jonas Brothers are who they want to be with, the freshly scrubbed male counterparts to Cyrus' self-empowered pop.

"We really are trying to write songs and music for where we're at right now," Kevin says. "I'm a 20-year-old, we date, we go through the breakups, we go through the good times and the bad times. Hopefully, people can relate."

Sure they can -- especially if they're still in braces.

And that's the eternal rub for young groups with an even younger audience, ensuring that their success isn't as fleeting as adolescence.

"We do think about it," Kevin says of the short shelf life of kid-friendly popsters. "We don't ever want to be anything that we're not. The people who are trying to leave where they're from or growing in different directions so drastically, is not who we are.

"With this next record, it was just more of an evolution of who we are," he continues. "We grew a little bit, wrote some more deeper songs. I think for us, it's really all about sticking to your fans and knowing that if you play to them, hopefully, you'll always be there."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0476.