TV Girl Comes to San Luis Obispo

December 6, 2023

On November 30th, TV Girl, a world-renowned band, came to San Luis Obispo. This hasn’t been the band’s first foray into our coastal city; the band first came to the Fremont Theater in the winter of 2021, then again in the spring of 2022 at the Shabang Music Festival.

The Madonna Inn Expo Hall, the venue for this concert, was seemingly unsuited for the large number of fans of the concert, causing a line of attendees wrapping around the parking lot at least three times over. The aisle of fans waiting for merchandise stretched the length of the venue as well, with some needing to wait more than 30 minutes to receive their t-shirt or their record.

The first show in 2021 featured the opener Jordana, who has collaborated with the band to create one of their most popular albums. Jordana also opened this show, at the Madonna Inn Expo Hall. Her set was incredible, though there were a few hiccups in her show. To start, her third song, Summer’s Over, was delayed 3 times due to an unruly crowd member. This upset the crowd, who were unresponsive to her set, only singing to her songs when they felt like it, yet filming her almost-every move.

Lead singer Brad Petering (right) singing to the crowd with keyboardist Wyatt Harmon (left) singing backing vocals

Following Jordana’s set, there was an enormous wait for the set-up of TV Girl themselves, taking nearly 40 minutes; longer than Jordana’s opening act. When the headlining band hit the stage, the crowd erupted.

The crowd was very impolite, as concert etiquette goes. There was not a song in the set without at least 30 people filming, making it difficult to see the stage, which, mixed with the intense haze of marijuana and vape fog made for a miserable experience if you stopped to think about the environment around you.

The concert itself was incredible, however, with the band playing almost all of their greatest hits, and adding in some of their lesser-known songs, like “It Evaporates,” and “99.5,” the latter off their most recent album, Grapes Upon the Vine, which underperformed in sales. This led to many jokes being cracked during the concert about said album’s poor sales, and even a sponsorship by Mountain Dew Code Red, which replaced a lyric in one of the last songs, Heaven Is a Bedroom, in which the normal lyric is “Forgive me for thinking heaven was her bedroom, it was as close as I’d ever get,” where “heaven was her bedroom” was replaced with “the refreshing taste of Mountain Dew Code Red”.