Jonas Blue was convinced to work with Why Don’t We by the band’s fans.
The ‘Don’t Wake Me Up’ hitmaker – who collaborated with the US boyband on the new track – has followed Ed Sheeran’s example by working with the quintet, but it wasn’t an instant “yes”.
He told the Daily Star newspaper’s Wired column: “I didn’t know too much about them, as soon as Jonah [Marais] messaged me in 2019, I realised how supportive their fans are and everything that they messaged was getting thousands of retweets.
“Fans just kept writing to me like, ‘Please do this’. I checked him out and checked the band out and I just fell in love with their voices.”
He admitted he’s a “huge fan” of their sound, and opened up on their writing process.
He added: “I love that kind of youthful, especially American, sounding vocal and I was a huge fan.
“We started speaking and it was in the works for quite some time now and like all of my songs, it started on an acoustic and it was all remote.
“It kind of started out with me just playing some chords and then both of us going back and forth working on the song.”
The DJ noted it’s been a “long process”, but he was delighted with the amount of input the band had on all aspects of the songs.
They’re yet to actually meet after communicating “over Zoom and FaceTime”, and a planned video shoot was postponed “a few weeks ago”.
Jonas explained” I was due to meet them a few weeks ago to shoot the video in LA but it got postponed.
“They’re incredible guys and they’ve got a huge career over in the US and the thing that I always love to do is find new talent that hasn’t broken in the UK, Europe or Asia.”