The three-day Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival has never needed a theme song since its debut in 2019 on multiple outdoor stages alongside San Diego Bay. And while Grammy Award-winning Oceanside troubadour Jason Mraz may have proffered a candidate during his impeccably polished, crowd-pleasing performance Sunday afternoon, it’s likely the festival’s producers will only want to partially embrace it.
During his third number, “Look For The Good,” Mraz sang: “Everyone needs sunshine, everyone needs rain.” No matter how sound those sentiments may be, Wonderfront surely did not want the rain that soaked Saturday’s performances by several artists, including Janelle Monae, Anderson .Paak & The Free Nationals and Portugal The Man.
Nor, presumably, were the event’s producers happy about the cooler than usual temperatures over the weekend, although Sunday saw the welcome return of clear skies and a high of 68. That was five degrees warmer than on Saturday and two degrees cooler than on Friday, when Wonderfront was headlined by South Korean DJ Peggy Gou and Canadian R&B singer Daniel Caesar.
Yet, while the sun shined brightly on Sunday — which also featured performances by Khruangbin and the reunited 4 Non Blondes — Wonderfront’s rain-soaked Saturday was more memorable, in part because of the wet, cooler weather, and drew sizably more people than turned out Sunday.
That’s an irony of sorts for the festival, which is now produced by La Jolla’s Events.com and which counted Tony Hawk, Rob Machado and former San Diego Padres’ pitcher Trevor Hoffman among its initial backers and brand ambassadors.
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Ironic, specifically because Wonderfront pivoted from November to May after its first two iterations in 2019 and 2022 didn’t draw as well as expected. That occurred, in part, because brisk nighttime temperatures appeared to limit attendance at the 15,000-capacity music marathon. (The festival was dark in 2020 and 2021 because of the COVID pandemic.)
Of course, it’s impossible to determine how much the weather was a factor this time around. But last year’s edition of Wonderfront drew nearly 42,000 people over three days and included the first sold-out day in the event’s history.
This year, none of the festival’s three days sold out and attendance Sunday was visibly lower than Saturday. On Monday afternoon, a Wonderfront representative told the San Diego Union-Tribune that this weekend’s three-day attendance was around 35,000. The dip in attendance Sunday could be because two of that day’s headliners, Khrungabin and Gary Clark, Jr., both performed here last summer at The Shell, the outdoor venue at Embarcadero Maria Park South that is just a stone’s throw away from Wonderfront’s two stages in Embarcadero Maria Park North.
Regardless of the attendance and weather conditions, Wonderfront’s 2025 edition was an improvement in several ways.
The festival’s layout was fine-tuned to allow smoother crowd flows, the DJ-fueled Bloom Electric Lounge was expanded to allow easier access, the number of LED screens at the two main stages was doubled, and new VIP amenities were added. The lineup’s mix of established and younger artists — including Leon Thomas, Sir and Mexican Slum Dogs — gave attendees a welcome opportunity to make new discoveries.
No matter how stunning Wonderfront’s panoramic bayside setting is for any outdoor music festival — the same site was the longtime home of the sadly now-defunct San Diego Blues Festival — the music is what counts most.
On Saturday, Monae and .Paak delivered the most memorable performances.
Janelle Monae and Anderson .Paak shined on a wet night at Wonderfront festival
On Sunday, the standouts included Texas blues, funk and soul dynamo Gary Clark, Jr., the energetically rocking Denver band The Fray, and the perpetually buoyant singer-songwriter Mraz, who has been a San Diego County resident since 1999.
Mraz and his aptly named Super Band opened with “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry)” and closed 12 songs later with the bouncy, disco-inspired “I Feel Like Dancing.” They performed with so much engaging verve and seamless precision that one attendee near me remarked aloud that, while he was not a fan of Mraz, this was the best and most accomplished set he’d heard all weekend at Wonderfront.
Prior to Mraz’s second song, the funk-tinged “You Might Like It,” the mustachioed troubadour told the audience: “If you don’t know the words, make up your own! This is not .”
He and Jessica Potter shared lilting vocals on “Lucky,” Mraz’s 2010 Grammy Award-winning duet with Colbie Caillat. The crowd enthusiastically sang along on his biggest hit, 2008’s “I’m Yours,” which at last count had been streamed more than 2 billion times.
“This is the only gig I know where they give you a round of applause at the end of your shift,” said Mraz, who recently became a co-owner of Oceanside’s Jitters Coffee Pub. He then encouraged his listeners to applaud their local baristas and trash collectors.
Former San Diegan Linda Perry performed immediately prior to Mraz with the reunited 4 Non Blondes, whose Wonderfront performance kicked off the long-dormant Bay Area band’s first run of concerts since 1994.
Where Mraz and his brassy Super Band were polished, note-perfect and exuded an infectiously upbeat vibe, 4 Non Blondes’ uneven 13-song set was alternately rousing and rough-and-tumble. It was a partial triumph and — at times — a mess, as might be expected from a musical ensemble that has been inactive since Bill Clinton’s first term as president.
Their first number, a charged version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” served as an ideal opening number for a band reactivating after 31 years, and Perry belted out the first verse with palpable relish: It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled / It’s been a long time since I did the stroll / Ooh, let me get it back, let me get it back / Let me get it back, baby, where I come from.“
Atter completing their third selection, “Train,” Perry said: “It’s been quite a long time since this band’s been on stage and we’re really grateful to have this moment.”
Curiously, “Train” was one of the few songs 4 Non Blondes performed from its lone album, 1992’s 7-million selling “Bigger, Better, Faster, More!” While Perry had said in a Union-Tribune interview published last week that the band would perform “Spaceman” and “Dear Mr. President” from “Bigger, Better,” neither was included Sunday.
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Instead, the three-woman, one-man group — which was augmented by a keyboardist and an additional guitarist — focused on songs from 4 Non Blondes’ never-completed second album, including “Hollow,” along with at least one new number that has yet to be titled.
Some of these songs hit their mark; others clearly need more time to evolve and undergo honing. Technical issues with one of her guitars proved distracting to Perry, as did some audio issues, for which she apologized to the audience. She also recalled her days as a teenager living in Balboa Park. saying: “I spent a lot of time here, did a lot of bad things in a lot of bad places with a lot of people. This city taught me a lot. I think I did pretty well.”
Which of the unfamiliar songs performed Sunday are destined for the next 4 Non Blondes album is unclear, and Perry said nothing about the album or her reunited bandmates to the audience. So, while such unfamiliar songs as “Monomorphic” might one day become new fan favorites, the shaky version performed Sunday remains a work in progress.
Yet, despite hitting several bumps, 4 Non Blondes easily ed for one of the highlights of the weekend with the moving performance of its biggest hit, “What’s Up?” The audience and the band jubilantly ed together as one in a mass sing-along, which was so well-received that a beaming Perry extended the song.
What resulted was a moment so inspiring any festival would be happy to claim ownnership. On Sunday, that festival was Wonderfront. Expect a similar moment when 4 Non Blondes perform this coming weekend at Napa’s BottleRock festival.
