Fenway Recordings Sessions

From an A&R desk to a Boston back room

The Sessions exist because of one person's day job. Mark Kates spent more than a decade at Geffen/DGC, where his A&R work put him in the room with Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Beck, Elastica and Hole, and he went on to run the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label as its president. He then returned to Boston and founded Fenway Recordings in 2001, with offices later added in New York and Los Angeles.

The company started as two things at once: an independent label and a management service. It released records between 2001 and 2006, including work by State Radio, The Kickovers and Longwave, and then stopped putting out records altogether to concentrate on management. That side of the business now handles MGMT, The Cribs, Doves, Mission of Burma, Josh Klinghoffer, and the Lol Tolhurst x Budgie partnership.

Kates also DJs, under the name DJ Carbo, and it is in that role rather than as a manager that he is credited as the resident and curator of the concert series. Away from both jobs he has worked on the Hot Stove Cool Music benefit concerts, which have raised money for the Jimmy Fund, and co-founded the Shout Syndicate Fund through the office of the then Boston mayor, Marty Walsh.

Spring 2004, and a move down Commonwealth Avenue

The first Sessions ran in spring 2004 at the Paradise Lounge, with Read Yellow, 7L & Esoteric and The Love Scene among the acts on those early bills. The series then moved to Great Scott in Allston, a 300-capacity club, and stayed there long enough for the two names to become effectively interchangeable in Boston. The Great Scott years brought The Cribs, Hard-Fi, Echo & the Bunnymen, Kate Nash, Freelance Whales, The Magic Numbers, Arab Strap, The Subways, Editors, Wolfmother and White Lies through a room that held fewer people than most of them would later play to in a single night.

That ended abruptly. On 1 May 2020 the club's manager, Tim Philbin, announced that Great Scott would not reopen after the pandemic, closing it after 44 years. The Sessions spread across other small venues — Brighton Music Hall, ONCE in Somerville and Café 939 — and have since concentrated on Brighton Music Hall at 158 Brighton Avenue, a short walk from where Great Scott stood. The series is produced with Crossroads Presents, the promoter that programmes the room.

A booking ledger instead of a discography

A concert series does not leave behind albums, so the body of work here is the list of who played and when. The count is the plainest measure of it: the series passed 500 performances in 2024, its twentieth year, and the company now puts the total at more than 550 shows since 2004.

The names on that ledger cut across genre rather than sticking to one scene. Diplo, Hot Chip, Hozier and MGMT have all headlined under the banner, as have fun., Lee "Scratch" Perry, alt-J, Ellie Goulding, The Wombats, Bat for Lashes, Tegan and Sara, Cold War Kids, Femi Kuti and Fountains of Wayne. Indie rock is the spine, but electronica, dub, reggae and Afrobeat have all had nights, and Fenway's own management clients — Mission of Burma, MGMT, The Cribs — have played as part of it too.

The closest thing to a catalogue remains the 2001–2006 label output, which is why the company's own anniversary is counted from 2001 while the Sessions are counted from 2004. The two numbers run five years apart and both get used.

Twenty-five years, and four songs at the end of it

The company's 25th anniversary was marked on Friday 14 August 2026 at Brighton Music Hall, billed as 25 Years of Fenway Recordings and free with advance tickets, with suggested donations going to the performers and to the Allston-Brighton Food Pantry. The bill was built entirely out of the current projects of Mission of Burma's members: a solo electric guitar set from Roger Clark Miller, then Consonant with Clint Conley alongside Chris Brokaw, Winston Braman and Luther Gray, then Big Time with Read Yellow's drummer Paul Koelle, then Minibeast with Peter Prescott, Pete Weiss and Keith Seidel.

What had not been announced was that the three of them would then play together. The Mission of Burma reunion ran roughly fifteen minutes and four songs — "Tremelo", "Einstein's Day", "The Ballad of Johnny Burma" and, from 1981, "That's When I Reach for My Revolver". Writing in The Arts Fuse on 17 August, Paul Robicheau found the set taken at a more deliberate pace than the band's original tempos but surprisingly intact given how little rehearsal had gone into it.

The night did not end there. Members of the band, joined by Brokaw and Seidel, played DMZ's "Don't Jump Me, Mother" in tribute to Jeff Conolly, the DMZ and Lyres frontman who had died on 31 July 2026, with Miller switching to cornet.

Where it stands in autumn 2026

The 2026 run has been the busiest evidence of the series' current shape: shame on 19 January, Weval on 1 February, Timecop1983 on 26 February, Goldie Boutilier on 8 March and Sienna Spiro on 14 March, femtanyl on 19 April, Courtney Marie Andrews on 22 April, Drugdealer on 29 April, an evening with Maya Hawke on 1 May, Carol Ades on 12 May, Old Mervs on 3 June, Robyn Hitchcock playing live and electric on 14 June, Arts Fishing Club on 17 June, Vincent Antone on 16 July, ford. on 24 July, Riff Wood on 7 August, the anniversary night on 14 August, Com Truise on 28 August and Tyler Ballgame on 19 September. That is roughly two a month, sustained across the year.

2025 was thinner but pointed in the same direction: Swervedriver in April, Squid in May, two Passion Pit nights on 24 and 25 June, French Police in November and Band of Skulls on 25 November.

Ticketing pages for the series currently carry around ten Brighton Music Hall dates running from late September 2026 into March 2027, though only two of them are billed under the Sessions name outright — Bebe Stockwell on 2 October 2026 and King Buffalo, an 18-and-over night, on 10 December 2026. The rest of the room's autumn programme sits alongside them: Zolita on 28 September, Kelsey Lu on 4 October, The Residents performing Eskimo on 13 October, LØLØ on 26 October, Porch Light on 7 November and Death From Above 1979 on 3 December, with a second Death From Above 1979 date on 3 March 2027.

The shape of a night

The format has stayed narrow on purpose. One headliner, a short bill, a standing room on Brighton Avenue, and listings that put most of these shows at a 7pm start. Kates works the doors and the gaps between sets as DJ Carbo, which is the one element common to every night regardless of who is headlining. Some dates are 18-and-over, including the King Buffalo booking in December.

The anniversary show was the exception that proved the rule — five separate sets in one evening, free entry, and a reunion held back until the end. On an ordinary Sessions night the appeal is closer to what the Great Scott years traded on: acts in a room considerably smaller than the one they will be playing on their next visit.