Nostalgia, surprise guest and a gender reveal

The Jonas Brothers brought more than a sibling experience onstage for their latest Detroit appearance — they served up a full-blown family affair.

Nostalgia was thick Thursday, Aug. 28, inside a sold-out Little Caesars Arena as the trio celebrated 20 years in the music biz for a charged-up, now grown-up audience ready to party like it was 2008, complete with colorful handmade posters and piercing shrieks. (The “I ♥ Hot Dads” shirts sported by a few fans across the arena did confirm we were definitely in 2025.)

“Each and every one of you are part of the story,” Nick Jonas told the crowd.

The Jonas Brothers’ latest tour has been marked by nightly special guests, and Detroit’s came in the form of Russell Dickerson, the long-working country singer whose career recently got a kickstart thanks to TikTok. The 38-year-old Tennessean took the stage to perform “Happen to Me,” his hit with its viral dance.

Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas are a quarter of the way into a 52-show tour dubbed Jonas 20: Greetings from Your Hometown, marking two decades since the siblings burst onto the scene with their Disney-stamped pop-rock. (The Detroit show was originally scheduled for Comerica Park and would have been one of several stadium dates on the run before it was downsized to LCA.)

It’s all part of a busy, nostalgic year that included March’s JONASCON in the band’s native New Jersey stomping grounds, along with a recent seventh studio album, “Greetings from Your Hometown,” and the planned holiday release of “A Very Jonas Christmas” on Disney+.

This year’s anniversary tour may seem superfluous, considering that the brothers were at LCA precisely two years ago this week running through the bulk of their catalog in a career retrospective called “Five Albums. One Night.”

But Thursday was a lively career recap nonetheless, delivered with seasoned polish from three guys in their 30s who were already seasoned and polished when they hit the showbiz radar as kids. In a two-act set, the Jonas Brothers tapped everything from their very earliest stuff — songs written long ago in their New Jersey living room — to music from the new album, including the return-to-form “Love Me to Heaven.”

In between were segments that captured the wider breadth of the Jonas journey, with songs from the assorted solo releases and side projects of Nick and Joe, as eldest brother Kevin dutifully manned his guitar throughout the night amid the 11-piece backing outfit and horn section.

The sizzle moments came with songs like “S.O.S.,” a Nick Jonas solo turn on “Jealous,” a performance of the neon-streaked disco-pop “Cake by the Ocean” by Joe Jonas and his DNCE bandmate JinJoo Lee, along with a late-show Nick-vs.-Joe medley that had the two chopping back and forth between respective solo material.

And then came the obligatory hit-packed closing stretch, as the catchy enchantment of “Lovebug” led into a festive, arena-shaking twofer of “Year 3000” and “Burnin’ Up.”

Fan engagement has long been part of the Jonas live approach, and the group assisted in its latest onstage gender reveal: With an expectant Clarkston couple watching on from the LCA mezzanine, the band performed a poignant “Little Bird” before Joe ripped open an envelope to announce “Boy!” to a roar from the crowd.

It was family night for the Jonas Brothers, too. Baby brother Franklin Jonas, 24, opened the bill with a 15-minute set of banjo-inflected Americana with his band the Byzantines, venturing into the audience as he sang a cover of Coldplay’s “Yellow” in an otherwise low-key set. This was, he pointed out, the first arena concert of his budding music career.

Franklin would be back to help finish the night. Following his brothers’ acoustic “Please Be Mine” — accompanied by 2004 footage of the group’s CBS-TV debut with that same song — they all assembled onstage with dad Kevin Jonas Sr. at piano for a family-reunion performance of “When You Look Me in the Eyes.”