Jonas and the Les Paul

It turns out Kevin Jonas - yeah, the guy from the Jonas Brothers lives and breathes guitar just like the rest of us

- BRUCE FAGERSTROM

AS PART OF the hugely successful pop group the Jonas Brothers, guitarist and singer Kevin Jonas has been in the limelight for 20 years, but his musical journey goes back way further than that; he's been steadily honing his skills from a young age.

"I taught myself guitar early," Jonas says. "I was home sick from school one day when I was 13 or 14, and we had a red knockoff electric guitar in the house and a 'teach yourself guitar' book in our piano bench.

I just looked at it and was like, 'You know what? Maybe I'll play guitar,' because I was already fooling around with the bass at that point. Opening up that book to playing guitar just changed everything for me. For the next week, I just kept cranking until my fingers were essentially bleeding. After that, I spent a lot of time playing acoustic guitar.

I got my first real guitar from my dad. He bought me a Takamine that had the tuner included. I loved that guitar, and I learned to play everything on it. We wrote our first song as Jonas Brothers, 'Please Be Mine,' on that guitar. And because of that guitar, I got into players like John Mayer. I was obsessed with his album Room for Squares. It really spoke to me from a songwriting perspective."