Rain or shine, Saturday is going to be a big day for local music.
Somerville Porchfest is back with free live music performances on about 500 front stoops and other locations around the city. And in Boston, City Hall Plaza will be home to the first-ever Mojo Boston Music Festival.
The huge Somerville event will be staggered into three zones, starting on the city’s western side and moving east, with performances ranging from indie and hip hop to Latin and jazz, running from noon to 6 p.m. The full lineup is available on the Somerville Arts Council website.
Meanwhile, a similarly varied lineup kicks off at noon at the Mojo Boston Music Festival.
“It’s going to be a bunch of great national, international, and local musicians,” said Mojo founder and CEO Charley Blacker. “We have a stacked lineup with a lot of indie rock music, and we got some house music throughout the day. And then at night, when the lights go down, it’s going to turn into a real house music festival with a really crazy production. And it’s going to be something that the city has never really seen before.”
Saturday’s Mojo Boston lineup includes the iconic house DJ AC Slater and indie bands like The Bends and The Gringos, as well as local groups like Morrissey Boulevard, Autumn Drive and Overserved Again.
The Mojo event is expected to be the largest festival to date for its organizers, who started their company just a few years ago as students at UMass Amherst.
“We knew there was a lot of people making music there and we kind of wanted to create one central hub where people could find out about the local artists,” said Emily Donovan, who now directs the company’s Boston branch.
Mojo started with smaller music performances in venues around Amherst, and they hosted their first festival last April in the nearby town of Hadley.
“I think we had 4,000 people show up to that one,” Donovan said. “And that day, it was absolute madness with the rain. It was pouring, but we kind of stuck with the mantra of ‘dance in the rain, play in the mud.’ And that’s exactly what people did.”
So they’re not too worried about this Saturday’s wet forecast.
“We have four or five festivals underneath our belts. Most of them it has rained,” Donovan said. “We’ve just kind of leaned into that. We can’t do anything about it, and we’re really encouraging people, you know, to get off their phones and have fun in the rain and just embrace some Mother Nature. Because I think, honestly, it’s going to make people live in the moment even more.”
