As I stood on the pavilion at Bayfront Festival Park, waiting to watch Duluth mayor Emily Larson take the stage with Jade and our Duluth Local Show host Mike Novitzki, I complimented her on the pithy, well-received response to a disparaging recent feature in Rolling Stone. She nodded. “It felt good,” she said. Rolling Stone’s […]

Laura and Dave Hoenack could not have picked a more precarious time to buy a record store. The year was 2009, at the height of the real estate crisis and recession. Dave, a special ed teacher, and Laura, who worked in school administration, didn’t have any retail or business experience to speak of, and their […]

Thomas Abban, the beguiling guitar prodigy and boundary pushing songwriter who has been turning heads in the Twin Cities for the past year, has been signed to the iconic and nearly century-old RCA Records. The label announced the signing today with the national release of two of Abban’s songs, “Death Song” and “Sinner,” on all […]

“There won’t be a Purple Rain Parkway, there won’t be a Little Red Corvette Court, there won’t be a Lovesexy Lane.” So says Chanhassen mayor Denny Laufenburger, telling KSTP about plans to build a residential neighborhood with about 200 houses on a swath of land once owned and occupied by Prince. The 188-acre site on […]

Opening with a flurry of dissonant electronic clanking, “Scream” still sounds electrifying nearly a quarter-century after it was released. It was hard to believe I was hearing it in the very studio where Michael Jackson and his sister Janet recorded the duet, on a pair of powerful speakers that were in use there at the […]

A tweet going viral right now claims that Bob Dylan was driving down Hollywood Boulevard on Monday when he suddenly stopped to get photos with a Spock impersonator and a Don King impersonator. Wait, what? This did actually happen, it seems — but it wasn’t this week, it was in February 2014. A more detailed […]

Richard Swift, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known for his work with the Shins and the Arcs among many other artists, has died at age 41 of an unspecified medical condition. “Today the world lost one of the most talented musicians I know,” wrote Dan Auerbach, who collaborated with Swift in both the Arcs and the […]

A new record label deal signed by Prince’s estate will allow the re-release of dozens of albums — starting with the LPs that came out after Prince broke with Warner Bros. in the mid-1990s. Industry reports have hinted that the Prince estate was close to signing a deal with Sony, replacing the Universal deal that […]

In the two years since Prince passed, one of the biggest revelations that has surfaced about his personal life is just how much money he was quietly funneling toward the causes he believed in, especially those that worked closely with marginalized youth in urban communities and provided students with access to music education. On what […]