What Happened to Jack Avery? Solo Music and Small Venues in 2026

If you were on YouTube or Instagram in 2017, you knew the five faces of Why Don’t We — and Jack Avery, with the curls and the piano ballads, was the one a lot of fans picked as their favorite. Then the band stopped touring, got swallowed by a four-year lawsuit, and quietly ceased to exist. Avery went silent for years. What brought him back into the headlines in 2026 is nothing anyone would have predicted, and it’s genuinely serious. Here’s where he is now.

01Profile

Full name

Jack Robert Avery

Born

July 1, 1999 (27 years old)

Birthplace

Burbank, California, USA

Raised in

Susquehanna, Pennsylvania

Occupation

Singer, songwriter, musician

Best known for

Member of Why Don't We (2016–2025); the album "8 Letters" (2018)

Solo work

"Please Don't Go" (2025), "Aphrodite" (2025), "XOXOX" (2026)

Yes — he turned 27 just weeks before this article was published. It’s easy to forget how young the Why Don’t We guys still are, because they’ve already lived through a full career arc: viral fame, arena tours, a bitter legal war, and a dissolution. Avery was 17 when the band formed.

02The Rise: From Busking in Nashville to a Top 10 Album

A self-taught kid from Pennsylvania

Avery was born in Burbank but grew up in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, one of five siblings. He taught himself guitar in sixth grade by watching online videos, and at 14 he spent a summer busking in Nashville — reportedly performing Jack Johnson’s “Banana Pancakes” on the street for tips. Like a lot of teenagers in the mid-2010s, he built an audience by posting covers online, and like a very small number of them, it actually worked.

Before Why Don’t We, he released a solo single called “Liar” in 2016 and toured on the “Impact” meet-and-greet circuit alongside two future bandmates, Zach Herron and Corbyn Besson.

Why Don’t We arrives

In September 2016, five solo social-media singers — Avery, Herron, Besson, Jonah Marais, and Daniel Seavey — merged into Why Don’t We. The strategy was straightforward and extremely effective: five existing fanbases, combined, plus EPs released at a relentless clip. Their debut EP, “Only the Beginning,” came out that same year.

The commercial peak arrived in 2018. “8 Letters,” their debut full-length album, was released August 31, 2018, on Signature Entertainment and Atlantic Records, and debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 with 44,000 album-equivalent units in its first week — the band’s first top 10 album. The title track, a piano ballad about the difficulty of saying “I love you,” became their signature song. They performed it on “The Late Late Show with James Corden.” They sold out theaters and then arenas. For a stretch of 2018 and 2019, Why Don’t We was one of the biggest pop groups aimed at teenagers in America.

Fatherhood at 19

In 2019, Avery became a father to a daughter with his then-girlfriend, Gabbie Gonzalez. He was 19 and in the middle of the band’s busiest touring years — a detail that matters enormously to everything that came later, because the custody arrangement over that child sits at the center of the criminal case now working its way through a Los Angeles courtroom.

03The Lawsuit That Ended the Band

The end of Why Don’t We wasn’t a creative falling-out. It was litigation, and it took four years.

• 2021The band publicly accuses its former management company, Signature Entertainment, of what they described as mental, emotional and financial abuse. Signature sues the members, reportedly seeking $50 million, for breach of contract and related claims.
• 2022In July, the group cancels its North American "The Good Times Only Tour" and announces it is "officially going on hiatus" amid the legal battle. They never tour together again.
• 2023–2024The case grinds on. The members stay largely out of public view; there is no new group music.
• Feb 2025An Orlando jury returns a mixed verdict. Four members — including Avery — owe a symbolic $1 each on breach of contract, and lose the rights to the Why Don't We name. Their defamation counterclaim fails, with $400,000 owed to Signature; Signature is separately ordered to pay $400,000 for breach of fiduciary duty, effectively cancelling out. The band is over.
• June 2025Avery releases his first solo single in nearly a decade, "Please Don't Go."

Losing the name is the part that stings. Whatever the dollar figures, the members walked out of that courtroom unable to legally call themselves the thing they’d spent nine years building. If you wondered why there was never a reunion tour announcement, that’s why.

04The 2026 Criminal Case

This section needs to be read carefully, because the details are grim and because the legal posture matters. Jack Avery is the alleged victim here, not a defendant. No one has been convicted of anything.

On May 19, 2026, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office announced charges against three people over an alleged murder-for-hire plot targeting Avery. According to the DA’s office, Gabriela Lauren Gonzalez, 24 — a TikTok influencer with a large following, and the mother of Avery’s daughter — along with her father Francisco Gonzalez, 59, and her then-boyfriend Kai Faron Cordrey, 26, were each charged with one count of attempted murder, one count of conspiracy to commit murder, and one count of solicitation of murder. Prosecutors say the alleged motive was a bitter custody dispute. If convicted, each faces 25 years to life in state prison.

Prosecutors allege that between October 2020 and May 2021 the plot was discussed and money changed hands, and that a solicitation was posted to a dark-web murder-for-hire site. The alleged plot was never carried out; according to reporting by Rolling Stone and NBC News, it was disrupted after an undercover FBI agent posing as a hitman made contact with one of the defendants in September 2021. The investigation was initiated by the FBI and later turned over to the DA’s office.

This was a lengthy investigation that was initiated by the FBI and eventually turned over to our office. — Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman, May 19, 2026

The DA’s office was explicit in its own announcement about what these filings are: “The charges filed in this case are allegations. The defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.” All three have pleaded not guilty, and the case remains pending as of this writing.

On the civil side, Avery sought and was granted a temporary restraining order in Los Angeles Superior Court, along with temporary sole legal and physical custody of the couple’s seven-year-old daughter, according to court filings reported by TMZ and NewsNation. In his petition, Avery wrote that he had been notified by the FBI that a hitman had been hired to kill him, and said he wanted custody in part so he could arrange therapy for his daughter.

Avery broke his public silence in an Instagram statement on May 21, 2026, beginning: “A few days ago, three individuals were arrested in connection with an alleged plot to kill me.” In the post, per TMZ’s report, he expressed relief that the matter was now in the hands of law enforcement, thanked investigators and fans, and referenced what he described as years of painful attacks on his family’s character.

05What He Is Doing Now

A real solo career, finally

The most straightforwardly good news in Avery’s 2026 is that he’s making music again on his own terms. After the verdict freed him from the Why Don’t We situation, he released “Please Don’t Go” on June 27, 2025 — his first solo release in nine years — followed by “Aphrodite” in September 2025, “Take the Wheel” in November 2025, and “XOXOX” in February 2026. It’s a steady, deliberate release cadence rather than an album drop, which is how most artists in his position rebuild now.

Back on the road, in small rooms

In January 2026 he played a short run of club dates — The Basement East in Nashville, Saint Andrew’s Hall in Detroit, Brighton Music Hall in Boston, and the Gramercy Theatre in New York. These are 400- to 700-capacity venues. For someone who was playing arenas in 2019, that’s a real reset, and it’s arguably the healthier version of the job: small rooms, an audience that came specifically for him, no management company owning the name on the marquee.

Raising his daughter

Publicly, Avery’s focus in 2026 appears to be his daughter and the ongoing court proceedings. Beyond what has been reported in his own filings and statement, we’re not going to speculate — she’s a child, and the family’s private situation isn’t ours to narrate.

06Summary

Jack Avery’s story doesn’t fit the usual “where are they now” shape. He didn’t burn out or fade quietly; the band he built was dismantled in a courtroom, and then he found out he had allegedly been the target of something out of a crime drama. That he’s putting out singles and playing club shows through all of it is, frankly, remarkable.

The honest answer to “what happened to Jack Avery” is that he’s 27, he’s a single father, he’s in the middle of a criminal case he never asked to be part of, and he’s writing songs. The next chapter is genuinely unwritten — but for the first time since 2021, it’s his to write.