Zac Brown is returning to his ‘favorite place to play in the world’ — Fenway Park
In 2023, Zac Brown Band broke the record for the most sold-out concerts at Fenway Park.
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It was their own record.
A little Fenway history-making is practically a tradition for the Atlanta group at this point. Zac Brown Band made their ballpark debut in 2014, and have been besting the number of Fenway sellouts since 2018, when they achieved their eighth and ninth packed houses. If the band knocks Sunday’s performance out of the park, their all-time record will jump to 15 sellouts.
Zac Brown Band has such an established relationship with the venue that they were inducted into Fenway Music Hall of Fame in 2022, joining the ranks of Billy Joel and Paul McCartney. Since then, only Noah Kahan has been added.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a time when I’m like, ‘Eh, I don’t really want to play Fenway,’” Zac Brown said on a Zoom call this spring before embarking on the band’s current “Love & Fear” tour. “Like, I’m in. And I’ll be like Willie [Nelson], I’ll be playing until I can’t play anymore.”
Naming Fenway as his “favorite place to play in the world,” he said that the Brown-ballpark bond is so strong that only a chance to perform at the Sphere could pull him away from Boston for an extended period. In December 2025, Zac Brown Band became one of the few acts who have held a residency at the cutting-edge Las Vegas venue, drawing 18,000 guests nightly for eight shows.
The special concerts took two years of planning and ample reflection on Brown’s part. Prior to the residency, the singer and guitarist said he generally didn’t reveal much about “who I am, where I come from, and what I stand for.”
That changed when he had to dream up visuals fit for the wraparound LED screens of the 366-foot tall, 516-foot-wide venue.
The imagery for the residency’s opening song, “Heavy Is the Head,” is “symbolic of coming out of a hellish kind of situation I grew up with,” Brown said. “I had an abusive stepfather — physically, mentally, to my mom and myself and my brother.” The Sphere’s LED screens immersed guests in a crimson valley rife with flames, as a behemoth-size skeleton loomed over the stage and the crowd; underfoot, people dressed as skeletons writhed and toiled with chains.
The intensity of the visual storytelling wouldn’t come as a shock to anyone familiar with the cover of the band’s 2025 album, “Love & Fear,” which depicts a clash between entities in heaven and hell.
Brown’s reward for communicating the challenges of his upbringing was an onslaught of devil-worship accusations, which were so pervasive that TMZ confirmed with a representative from the Church of Satan that the show was not, in fact, a Satanic ritual. The online criticism conveniently omitted the context of Brown’s prerecorded opening monologue for the residency, which detailed nights spent lying in bed, “gripping a knife, waiting for a chance to end my abusive stepfather,” and eating “freezer-burned food in battered women’s shelters” with his mother.
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“If you listen to the story and follow it, that entire show couldn’t have been more about hope and love and overcoming those things . … I referenced Jesus three times, in three different songs,” Brown said. On the Zoom call, he nonchalantly waved off the criticism, calling the commenters “vultures and scavengers” who are “making money off trying to demonize something that I’m doing.”
For the bandleader, setting an example through his vulnerability — especially for other men — is worth the online chatter. (Which, for the record, Brown doesn’t participate in; he said he “doesn’t have a newsfeed” on his phone.) When he performs songs about his daughters, for example, he often sees that openness reflected back at him through “grown men tearing up and crying at the show.”
Zac Brown Band’s Fenway performance Sunday will be “plenty different” from the shows at the Sphere, although Brown’s vulnerability is “something that will be part of all of our shows from now on.”
“You’re gonna feel your love, or your loss, or your family — you’re gonna be reminded of those things that occur in your life,” he said. “That’s a worthy cause.”
Brown also volunteered his thoughts on what he called another “worthy cause”: performing at the UFC Freedom 250 Fan Fest outside of the White House this past June. He noted his policy of “patriotism, not politics” and that his intention was to “honor all of our service people” and “the people that let us have our American dream here and that keep us safe every day.”
“People are going to say things about that,” he added. “They’re going to try to tear me down and align me with whatever.”
As expected, June’s UFC Freedom 250 performance generated plenty of headlines. So will Brown’s next move at Fenway Park. The band’s got a curveball in store for guests at Sunday’s performance that will make history — and for once, it won’t be a feat that’s specific to Fenway.
“Just wait until you see what we’re doing,” Brown said.
“It’s crazy, I don’t think it’s ever happened in the history of the world.”
ZAC BROWN BAND
With Old Crow Medicine Show. At Fenway Park, 4 Jersey St., Boston, Sunday, Aug. 2., 7 p.m. Tickets: $89 and up. mlb.com
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