Sony
2006
It's About Time
About This Album
It's impossible to talk about the Jonas Brothers and their 2006 debut, It's About Time, without discussing Hanson. Like Hanson, the Jonas Brothers are not only a trio of siblings -- ranging in age from 17 to 13 at the time of the release of their first album -- who play their own instruments and write (some of) their own songs; they have a relentlessly sunny spirit that hearkens back to the classic '60s and '70s pop as heard on Time-Life compilations. If Hanson learned this sound from those original Time-Life collections, the Jonas Brothers picked up the strand from Hanson and then went to Hot Topic, creating a bubblegum type of mall punk that's considerably heavier on the bubblegum than the punk. But that's not the only difference -- where Hanson worked with such hipsters as the Dust Brothers, the Jonas Brothers work with studio pros Michael Mangini and Steve Greenberg, who both did production work for Joss Stone and help bring a similarly slick but consciously classic vibe to It's About Time as they did to the retro-soul of Joss Stone. Despite these hints of commercial punk flair, the Jonas Brothers are at their core Hanson for the new millennium -- and since Steve Greenberg was the executive producer of that trio's 1997 debut, Middle of Nowhere, that shouldn't come as too big of a surprise, but if you go into It's About Time not knowing any of this, it's kind of a shock to hear 11 fizzy singalongs that sound like reworkings of "MMMBop.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 and 8)

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