After sunset on a Tuesday evening, purple lights shine on the white tiles that line Paisley Park and there are only a few cars left in the rear parking lot. The building’s public tours have shut down for the day, and the merch booths and cash registers are shrouded in purple fabric, all the lights […]
Given how famously idiosyncratic his songs are, it’s remarkable how well Bob Dylan translates to cover versions. That’s been clear since the ’60s, when performances by Joan Baez, the Mamas & the Papas, the Byrds, Judy Collins, and other artists helped make the mercurial singer-songwriter a household name. The latest artist to put her stamp […]
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, or maybe it’s because living in modern-day America feels like trying to meditate in the middle of a tornado full of barbed wire, bleating cattle and six lanes of rush hour traffic, but lately I find that I only really want to listen to two kinds of music: the […]
If you’ve listened to Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound, seen Solange live, or caught certain shows by Carly Rae Jepsen, you’ve likely heard Ava Raiin before. You might not know it — she’s rarely on center stage. But Raiin has put years into her background singing career, and she’s so good that some of music’s most influential names […]
The Twin Cities music community was dealt a hard blow this weekend with the passing of Sonny Knight, an endlessly charismatic and powerful soul singer whose history on local stages dates all the way back to the early 1960s. From cutting his first 45 as Little Sonny Knight back in 1965 to recording his final […]
Dan Wilson makes many things for many people. He fronts Semisonic, the Minnesota-based band that scored ’90s fandom with “Closing Time.” He has written songs with dozens of musicians, from edgy pop artists (Phantogram, K.Flay) to country greats (Dixie Chicks, Chris Stapleton) to mainstreamers whose albums your mom tracked down at Target (Adele, Taylor Swift). He’s a producer and a […]
Michael Bland is the type of guy who could literally talk for hours and never cease to be surprising, enlightening, and downright hilarious. Having been discovered by Prince at an early age and enlisted as one of the founding members of his long-running New Power Generation, and later becoming a revered session player and touring […]
Celebration 2017, a four-day event at Paisley Park last April, drew plenty of Minneapolitans to Prince’s home. That said, most of the long weekenders hailed not from the Twin Cities or outstate Minnesota, but from far-flung states and even other continents. Such was the case of Belgians Stijn Vandeputte and François Vidal, plus their Italian/Brazilian friend Nicola […]
In the four years since Fathom Lane released its second album, a lot has changed. After releasing two albums in its first two years, members of the band took some time to focus on their own lives, and the group replaced its original guitarist and rhythm section with a new group of musicians. But even […]
In addition to his regular roles running the multimedia music company Soul Tools Entertainment, hosting KFAI’s Saturday-night show of the same name, writing articles for Insight News, and serving as the department head of the hip-hop program at McNally Smith College of Music, Toki Wright has spent significant time touring the world as an official […]
