I Went To P1Harmony's Most Wanted Tour Fairfax Concert 9/29!
Guess who impulse bought tickets 2 hours before the concert? MEEEEE !!! (recap of ticket-buying experience & extended thoughts on the concert itself below the cut!)
GETTING TICKETS!
When I saw on social media that P1Harmony concerts weren't entirely sold out, I started toying with the idea of buying tickets close to the concert date to try and see how cheap my tickets could get! I'd seen people on TikTok employ the 'buy day of the show' ticket-buying strategy for kpop concerts before with great success, so P1H seemed like a worthwhile group to test it out with (since the show was easy to travel to, and I wouldn't be devastated if I failed to get affordable tickets since I was unfamiliar with the group).
The first step was to be realistic and set a budget for how much I was willing to spend on two tickets for my partner and myself. Thanks to working an overtime weekend event at work recently, I had a budget of about $250 of play money I was willing to spend for P1H.
On the day of the concert, I started checking Ticketmaster, Stubhub, and Seatgeek back-and-forth throughout the day in order to price compare and check where the best available seats were. I personally prefer to sit with a centered view of the stage in order to best appreciate the choreo formations, as opposed to sacrificing that to get closer to stage from a side seat. With that in mind, I was mainly checking the pricing for the back sections of the P1H Fairfax stop's concert venue: Eaglebank Arena (George Mason University's basketball court gym, turned concert venue for P1H!).
As it were, the best time and prices ended up popping up around 4pm concert day, when the resellers were getting antsy about nobody buying their remaining tickets. I was able to snag two tickets on StubHub that were NOT in the furthest back nosebleed row for around $85-90 each. With additional fees, my total still ended up being slightly under $200 for two tickets, so I was actually successful in staying under my budget!
Check out our spot!
PRE-CONCERT!
Because the concert venue is on a college campus, there are already parking lots on site that concert-goers are expected to use. I was a little worried to not have a reserved parking place like I would if I had reserved a spot in a parking garage (and was fully bracing for the brutal timesink of wandering around the Eaglebank Arena's parking lot in circles looking for a spot), but in the end we found a spot nearly immediately! Parking was surprisingly smooth and quick, thank goodness!!! My partner and I quickly parked and walked like two minutes over to stand in the visible lines already forming outside at the Eaglebank Arena as the concert-goers waited for the doors to open.
As expected of excited kpop fans, P1eces were super social!! Within the first 20 minutes of getting in line, I had already successfully met up with a TikTok mutual (our first time seeing each other irl!) and exchanged freebies with her! The P1ece girl standing in front of us in line starting making small talk as soon as she overheard us talking about how much we were looking forward to our first P1Harmony experience! We exchanged freebies with her too, and immediately began getting to know each other in line as we all waited.
Turns out she had traveled from another state all by herself for the concert, even though P1H isn't her ult group! She recently had taken a big exam and had gotten herself a P1H concert ticket as a treat for a job well done! Congrats, friend!
Conversation flipped between discussing P1H and talking about our other favorite groups--she was a big 82major and Seventeen fan, and my partner and I of course had to bring up our love for Ateez (only other boy group concert we’ve attended so far!). Incidentally, mentioning Ateez caught the attention of the mom standing behind us, who quickly hopped into our conversation circle to talk about how she had been fortunate enough to travel with her tween to TWO of Ateez's US concert stops, including their LA stop!! We were so envious and impressed! Atiny Mom had traveled to the P1H show by herself because after two Ateez shows, her Atiny kid was all kpopped out! He tapped out on the concert adventures and encouraged his mom to venture out to P1H on her own instead!
Atiny Mom may not have brought her own kid to the P1H concert, but I definitely noticed a lot of families with young kids at this concert compared to our Ateez concert experience (for obvious reasons, given how Ateez has allowed their performance concepts to mature as they've grown older).
When we got to our seats inside the venue, we were seated in a row behind a pair of 11 and 16 year old P1eces who were comparing their ages to the adult P1ece sitting right next to us in our own row! When our seat neighbor told the kids that she was in her late 20s, the girls teasingly told her she was chopped and also unc (essentially: 'you're not a teen like us? damn, you're old!') 😭 The poor adult P1ece turned to us and pleaded for us to translate what the heck the girls were talking about, because she was totally stumped by their shenanigans at this point LOL fortunately, the tone was entirely playful and not genuinely hating on us adult P1eces!! We handed out some freebies to everybody involved as a peace offering and settled down as the opening act started!
Fun fact, my last-minute freebies were exclusively Soul-themed. I had a lot of fun making them in the days leading up to the concert! Check 'em out haha!
CONCERT START!
The opening act Ampers&one was great live!! Their songs aren’t something I usually listen to, but they had enough stage presence and catchy enough songs for us to be bopping along to the beat during their opener set. I wasn't particularly incentivized to explore them further (not yet, at least), so I don't have many other notes beyond 'that was fun! good job on stage, guys!'
When it was P1H's turn to come out, they did so after an introductory video played: after traveling through space on a spaceship, our P1H heroes had crash landed here on stage to perform for everybody! They even leaped out of a projected black hole (and sang an opening song with the same title!).
I LOVED P1Harmony’s use of their on-stage screens as a background for their performances. The atmosphere and space theme was soooo good, and they clearly had put a lot of thought into coordinating the aesthetics of their costumes and backgrounds for this concert concept. As a sci-fi enjoyer, I was eating up every detail of this intergalactic theme!! Look how beautiful their Black Hole set was!!
The backgrounds were so visually interesting--AND they were thoughtful enough to add lyrics to the background images, which made it super easy to sing along even as a new fan! During Stupid Brain, one of P1H's songs off their latest ep EX, the members simply sat on stage and sang along while the lyrics played out behind them. It felt like a group singalong, and a nice breather amidst all the more hype songs on the setlist. I thought it was smart! Gave the group members a chance to get off their feet for a few minutes and take a break from dancing. Clever way to recharge their energy!
To be honest, I kinda wish I’d brought my lightiny to wave in the audience, since SO MANY OTHERS brought their own lightsticks regardless of group - enhyphen sticks, neobongs, stray kids lightsticks, lightinys, etc were all in the crowd that night! I had been worried that a lightiny would have stuck out too much since they have minimal manual color-changing functions, but when you have multiple neobongs unapologetically blasting pockets of BRIGHT GREEN LIGHT in the crowd, it's hard to feel too self-conscious about one's own mismatched lightstick LOL gotta love it! Maybe next time, I'll bring my lightiny along to the next non-ATEEZ show. Maybe.
Admittedly, having a free hand was nice too! Made it easier to dance!
I was incentivized to film more this concert compared to my last ATEEZ concert (where I got barely ANY videos) because the steep seats of the sports arena left me nervous to stand up at first...but then later in the evening my partner and I eventually stood up and danced because the songs towards the end of the concert were back-to-back high bpm BANGERS! Flashy is officially one of my top favorite P1H songs, after dancing to it live. DUH! and Dancing Queen are also top contenders, but really most of P1H's songs are enjoyable to listen and sing along to even if you're unfamiliar with them.
ESPECIALLY WHEN THE GUYS WERE PUTTING THE HARMONY IN P1HARMONY ALL NIGHT!!! You can literally hear my partner go "WHOAAA" in shock at how clean Theo and Keeho's harmonizing was! There's no doubt that P1H's vocal line is solid at what they do! They sound fantastic live!
IMPRESSIONS OF THE MEMBERS!
Speaking of Keeho...He's SUCH a superstar!! His charisma and personality really shines when he's performing, and every joke he cracked on stage succeeded in getting my partner and me laughing. If you've seen a viral TikTok of Keeho being sassy before, just know that his on-stage personality is pretty much exactly like that, too! He talks with the audience super conversationally and off the cuff. At one point, he told us a funny story during ments about how he, Soul, and the leader of Ampers&One went walking around Fairfax prior to the concert day. They admired the large houses in the area...and also got attacked by the bugs here. I like to think Keeho was referencing our terrible plague of spotted lanternflies when he mentioned how buggy it was here! Sorry Keeho, but getting jumped by lanternflies is an East Coast rite of passage these days.
My partner went into the concert entirely blind to the group and their personalities, but he got charmed by Keeho SO fast, I swear!! EVERY TIME time Keeho popped up on screen, my partner was fanboying and yelling about his flawless facecard and fire vocals LOLLL
A pic taken during Keeho's solo cover of Phresh Out the Runaway by Rihanna!
Keeho may have already won my partner's favor, but Soul was my personal favorite member--I just love how Soul's gimmick on the team is being a strange otherworldly guy (and I was very impressed with his body control and dance skills)! I was looking forward to seeing him in action IRL!
I knew enough about P1H to know that Soul is one of the shyer members who doesn't always prefer to draw the spotlight to himself—and as such, Soul didn't have many standout moments to shine individually during the actual concert (aside from his solo dance performance--which he did instead of a solo song cover), but I did get to see Soul interacting with the barricade audience members in the middle of the show. He started smiling and doing some jojo pose-like dance moves where he got low to the ground and got back up again, practically looking like he was defying physics. It was impressive, and the audience loved it! He was having a good time on stage, just at his own quiet pace. I'm glad he's found a group that respects and accommodates his comfort zone!
I don't have many specific thoughts on Theo and Intak--not for lack of talent mind you, but just because I wasn't able to learn all that much about them just from seeing them on stage. Theo seems like another quieter personality type, but he does plays the guitar which is pretty awesome! I don't know much about Intak, but he threw a little thirst trap fanservice into his solo song performance and unfortunately that's the memory of him that stands out the most post-concert LOL I haven't learned more about him yet!
Jiung was SO bright-eyed and happy on stage! Of all the members, I felt like it was most obvious how much he specifically enjoys performing and being up on stage--he was all smiles the entire concert!! I saw online that apparently he hadn't toured in the US during their last tour due to an injury, I believe? So his enthusiasm definitely felt like it came from a place of having missed the experience last time. His passion showed! He seems like a performer who has a lot of heart: you can tell he loves what he does!
I was really excited to see Jongseob in action since I knew of his reputation as a skilled kpop rapper (with even non-P1eces online affectionately referring to him as "That Lil Boy From P1Harmony"), but the sound quality and screaming audience left me mostly unable to appreciate his rapping as much as I’d hoped to. It seemed like he was really popular, given how loud the audience got during his solo cover of Sticky by Tyler, the Creator!
But hey, concerts are the ideal place to get hype and show your faves some love! I can't be too upset that our audience was a lively one! If nothing else, the P1H guys can see how much their fans adore them (and I can always just listen to P1H at home, if I truly want to listen to Jongseob more clearly). While at the concert, I was too busy dancing in order to save the planet!
FINAL THOUGHTS ON P1HARMONY, FROM AN ATINY’S POV:
Definitely worth seeing live! Concert vibes were super welcoming and inviting, even for new fans
P1Harmony has a nice mix of Korean and English songs! Even if you're not a familiar fan with their music, you're going to be able to hop right in and sing along with the P1eces!
Fanchants really weren't a thing as a result of this, since we were able to just sing with P1H the entire time
P1Harmony definitely has some quieter members in their group, but the majority of P1eces are endeared instead of put off by the members' shyness, and the more sociable members of the team carry the weight of keeping energy up. It's definitely a group dynamic that only works BECAUSE it's these six working as a team, though: they balance each other out
I felt like putting all six solo songs back-to-back instead of staggering them amongst the group songs hit the brakes on the momentum of the show a little bit. It was nice as a showcase of each member one by one, but I think that there’s also merit in planning solo performances to be at different points in the set list so that we don’t switch gears as abruptly. Admittedly, this opinion is entirely influenced by how ATEEZ handled their 8 solos in their IYF tour
The last few songs into the encore set transformed the show into a nonstop dance party! Completely lost my fear of steep seating and was willing to stand up and dance because the music was THAT catchy!
P1H definitely commits more to the clean-cut, sassy pop boy group image than anything else. The ‘craziest’ thing that happened was Intak lifting his shirt a little during his solo cover song and the crowd went wild. After witnessing ATEEZ live thoughh….I can't say I was very phased by that lil bit of fanservice LOL
If you've actually read til the end here, then check out my freebie haul! My partner's Keeho haul is on the left, and then my Soul haul on the right! Much thanks to the P1eces who gifted each freebie to us! Absolutely love all of the homemade items and charms!
The Soul picture freebie made me laugh because he looks like he's dressed Amish 😭 All he needs is a straw hat, and he'd fit right in at a weekend farmers' market LOL
I'm especially thankful that my partner got to participate in freebie gifting for this concert, because I'm always concerned that other kpop fans might accidentally exclude him from the fun if they were to wrongly assume he's "the reluctant male partner that was just dragged to see a boy group by his female kpop stan partner" instead of him being a sincere new fan in his own right. It means a lot to me that I have a spouse who fully embraces my recent fascination with kpop fandom, and it makes me happy to have other people see his enthusiasm too! I love fandom!!!!
