No major musician has ever been as proudly Minnesotan as Prince. He was born here, he played his most significant shows here, and he recorded most of his music here. The list of local destinations for Prince fans to visit could run into the dozens, but here are the top five you absolutely can’t miss.…

It’s not that we really needed an excuse to celebrate our vibrant and history-making music scene in Minnesota, but the Super Bowl provided a pretty great one. Over the next week, hundreds of thousands of visitors will flood the Twin Cities in search of football, entertainment, and nightlife, and a very bright spotlight will be shined on…

Dessa – “Good Grief” The Beach Boys loaded up their woody with surfboards, but Dessa’s station wagon has a more fraught cargo in a new video for her single “Good Grief.” She and Zach Coulter (Solid Gold) take to the country; after fueling up at the Harris 61 Stop, they open up a farmhouse, have…

About 125,000 people are expected to come to Minnesota for Super Bowl LII — and many of them are music fans. If you’re in the Twin Cities and want to get a taste of our thriving live music scene, here are five venues to put on your shortlist. First Avenue and 7th St Entry 791…

Echo Helstrom, the Duluth native known to Bob Dylan fans as likely the prime inspiration for the 1963 song “Girl from the North Country,” has died at age 75, reports the Star Tribune. Helstrom grew up with Dylan — then known as Bobby Zimmerman — in Hibbing, where the two had a high school romance…

Minnesotans who checked out the recent Guillermo del Toro exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art were well-primed to embrace the Mexican director’s triumph in this year’s Academy Award nominations: his strangely sexy merman story The Shape of Water leads nominees with 13 nods. Not much connection to The Current’s playlist there, unless you count the…

Following a decidedly spunky first night of The Current’s 13th Birthday Party on Friday, a First Avenue Mainroom crowd gathered on Saturday to keep the party going. With a lineup that included local acts Reina del Cid and Lady Lark, as well as Ron Gallo and headliner JD McPherson, it is safe to say that…

Here at The Current, we like to think ourselves resistant to trends. But one in particular has impressed me this winter: residencies, or weekly sets of concerts captained by one local artist at one local venue once a week. I actually got so excited about this month’s shows that I decided to see one from…

The Current’s two-day birthday party kicked off Friday night in First Avenue’s Mainroom.  The lineup included local artists deM atlaS, the Social Animals, and Now, Now, with the headliner for the night being Nashville-based band Bully — whose frontwoman Alicia Bognanno originally hails from Rosemount, Minnesota. The excitement built throughout the night, with each act…

Here at The Current, we’re getting psyched for our 13th Birthday Parties, which we’ll throw at First Avenue tonight and tomorrow. We’ve been talking to Bully about bandmates, asking JD McPherson for teenage parenting tips…and now, spotlighting a few of our favorite music videos by birthday party bands. See them all at First Avenue this…