Nick Jonas

You should go see this manager.

So a couple weeks later, they drove me and the brothers to go see this manager named Shirley Grant.

She was this lovely older woman with all these photos of kid actors on her wall that she had made famous.

And she was kind of a staple in New Jersey for kids that wanted to be in the business.

I went in and I auditioned for her, sang all the songs I knew, which was mostly just pop music.

And then she said, well, there's some signs here that we could have a path ahead of us, but you need to go learn show tunes.

So I spent six months devastated that it didn't just happen.

My very short-sighted seven-year-old mind thinking my career was over.

And I started learning show tunes with my dad and came back and

auditioned for her again and she started sending me on auditions and eventually I was on the Broadway stage and and I've really not looked back since um went from doing that for three four years to recording music and then you know just the stars kind of aligning and obviously me and the brothers had a you know a song that we wrote we were kids um that someone heard that label and wanted to sign all three of us and it just kind of went from there

Being, you know, the first family of the church, right?

My dad was the pastor.

We were expected to behave a certain way, expected to be sat in the front pew of the church every Sunday morning with our tie and, you know, our suit on.

And there was a lot of eyeballs on us, which I think was actually great

training ground for what we would then experience on Disney so many years later.

We didn't expect that to happen.

We were initially signed to a label that didn't really know what to do with us.

And we got dropped after our first album came out.

And we were hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, credit card debt, money that we did not have because there's no money in ministry, really.

We had to sort of figure something out.