Vicki Peterson & John Cowsill coming to Brillion

This story first appeared in the Feb. 26, 2026, print edition of The Brillion News.

By David Nordby

The Brillion News

Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill are used to being on stage with family members. It just wasn’t ever with a spouse.

Peterson, a founding member of The Bangles, and Cowsill, who first played with his family band the Cowsills and later The Beach Boys, have decades of stage experience.

For the last few years, it’s been as a duo on stage together, a show that they’ll bring to Brillion at Round Lake Farms on March 7 at 7 p.m.

“It’s new and we’re really enjoying that,” Peterson said. The two married in 2003 and last year produced an album together called “Long After the Fire,” that they say is a love letter dedicated and inspired by Cowsill’s late brothers, Bill and Barry. “It’s sort of our tribute to them. It was a love project, something we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. We finally got it done, got it out last year and so we’ll be doing that,” Peterson, 68, said.

“We’re going to pepper it out with some songs from our past,” Cowsill, who turns 70 on March 2, said. “We’ve been in so many other entities that we’re bringing some of that to the show, and we talk too much and we have a lot of stories.”

Opposite Coasts to Start

The two started their lives on opposite ends of the country; Peterson from Los Angeles and Cowsill from Newport, Rhode Island.

“I think the similarity that we have is both of us were encased and obsessed with music from very, very young ages,” Peterson said.

For Peterson, that was being inspired by listening to the radio aspiring to be like The Beatles.

“Of course, in California, we’re just in our car all the time in Los Angeles so it was just all a matter of AM radio which in the late ‘60s … had a great wide variety of songs that were being played all day long,” Peterson said.

Across the country, it was similar for Cowsill.

“Radio was the same from coast to coast. The order of songs was the same coast to coast,” Cowsill said. “Program directors were not allowed to change that order of the songs, or they’d get their butts fired.”

By the time Cowsill was just seven years old, he was on stage often for as many as four sets a night with his brothers Bill, Bob and Barry, his mother Barbara, and sister Susan.

“We did Beach Boys, (Rolling) Stones, Beatles … I grew up on it all and that’s my education in music,” Cowsill said.

Swept Up in the Vortex

Both Peterson and Cowsill became deeply entrenched in the music world.

Peterson and The Bangles had world-famous hits, notably “Manic Monday,” which was written by Prince, and “Walk Like An Egyptian.” Both of those songs have more than 100 million views on YouTube.

“Luckily they’re still sort of in the cultural zeitgeist because they continue to get licensed for various projects, so that’s kind of a nice thing to be able to still stay in the culture,” Peterson said.

Cowsill recorded with Tommy Tutone on the song “867-5309/ Jenny” then later toured as part of The Beach Boys band for 23 years.

“It was a great gig,” Cowsill said. “I didn’t know how I’d have a career in music, so I just got swept up into the vortex and I got lucky.”

Peterson also has toured extensively with The Continental Drifters.

“Although I’m not physically related to anyone in that band, it still feels like family. When you’re in a band for a long time, you become family. You function as a family in all the good and not so great ways that that can happen,” Peterson says with a chuckle. “I think it’s really special.”

Now the two who are partners in every aspect of life are touring together.

“We didn’t know if we could work together but it is so fun and we laugh so much and we’re relieved by that,” Cowsill said.

“We have multiple layers to our relationship. We’re like friends, we’re brother and sister, we’re husband and wife, we’re … funny people,” he added.

“My younger self would be pretty impressed because I had a huge crush on John Cowsill since like the age of nine,” Peterson says as Cowsill laughs. “To be making records and performing with him in my later life, I think I would (have been) very, very pleased.”

Coming to Wisconsin

The two say they have a soft spot for Wisconsin.

In recent years, the two have performed in Madison at The Sylvee as part of the epilepsy fundraiser Joey’s Song, an event organized in honor of five-year-old Joseph Gomoll who passed away in 2010 from Dravet Syndrome.

“I haven’t been there enough for my tastes because I like the state, I like the people and excited to come back,” Peterson said. “Wisconsin is just a fantastic state and obviously a lot of music lovers there.”

Cowsill has been to the state likely more than 100 times, but this will be one of the first as an act with Peterson. “

The smaller audience is more fun. It’s more personable,” Cowsill said, adding at anything can happen at a smaller venue. “It’s really intimate and it’s fun and Vicki and I are the focal point. We usually are a little bit of a focal point (in the band) but our names are on this now.”

“It’s much easier to interact with an audience so it’s different every night so you’ll see someone out in the audience doing something and you’re going to comment on it,” Peterson added.

The two have seen a lot since their lives and careers took off in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Music has changed in that time, too.

“But it never just seems to cease to become a touchstone for people where they connect with each other, with their own lives. It can be a time machine,” Peterson said. “You can listen to a song and all of a sudden you’re 11 again, but then on the other hand, you can hear a song that might have been from 1974 but you never heard it before, so it’s brand new to you and then it’s now connecting you to this moment in time … Music has never stopped being this beautiful connection between humans.”

“It’s transcending, really,” Cowsill said.