Joan Jett will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 18, and she tells Billboard “There should be more women in the Hall of Fame, and more women in rock. They’re out there, they just don’t get the notice the pop girls do.” She also recommends that young musicians keep…

Two prominent local bands are turning to the public to help support the release of new music. Across the country, crowdfunding has helped bring a degree of control back into musicians’ hands and has allowed bands to interact directly with their fan bases. Today, we’re seeing it utilized in the Twin Cities as both legendary band…

A recent Bruce Springsteen album is titled Wrecking Ball, and that’s exactly what might come for the Upstage: a club in Asbury Park, New Jersey where Springsteen, Little Steven Van Zandt, Southside Johnny, and others played important early gigs in the late ’60s and early ’70s. The club has been closed since 1971, but remains substantially intact; it’s now in…

Happy Friday! I’m about to run out the door to start making my playlist for the First Avenue 45th anniversary bash tonight, which I’ll be hosting and DJing along with Barb Abney from Go 96 and Zoe Peterson from Radio K. Before I go, though, I just had to share this batch of videos that were…

A couple weeks ago, the city of Rochester announced its plan to buy the Chateau Theatre. The building was used as a Barnes & Noble from 1994 up until Dec. 31, 2014; since then, it has been vacant. Why is the venue’s future important? In part, because of its storied past. To put it briefly,…

Anyone who has seen Venus de Mars perform with her band All the Pretty Horses knows that the veteran punk rock and goth artist isn’t afraid of putting it all out there—at times literally, with only a few strips of electrical tape and a well-placed corset serving as her only stage wear. Her new album, Flesh and Wire,…

Pharrell Williams stopped by The Tonight Show and told Jimmy Fallon about his current projects—including work with Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, and, yes, Missy Elliott. Williams and Fallon also performed as the fictitious 80s R&B duo “Afro & Deziak.” (Billboard) An appropriately strange charity tribute concert to David Lynch in Los Angeles featured performances by Duran Duran (Lynch directed a concert film featuring…

The Minnesota Music Coalition‘s annual Minnesota Music Summit is coming to the Amsterdam Bar & Hall and McNally Smith College of Music next weekend (April 9-11), with a packed lineup of concerts, artist workshops, video screenings, industry panels, mentoring sessions, networking events, and a keynote address by Dar Williams. The Current’s Local Show host, David Campbell, will…

Some shows are so powerful that they feel like they will live on in our minds and hearts forever. For Cloud Cult, a trio of intimate acoustic shows they performed in Minneapolis back in December 2013 were such a smash success that they have been carefully recorded and preserved for posterity in a new film, Unplug. Filmed at the…

David Bowie is writing new music and collaborating with playwright Enda Walsh for a new work of musical theater based on the story of The Man Who Fell to Earth, reports the New York Times. The new work, titled Lazarus, will be presented off-Broadway by the New York Theater Workshop and directed by Ivo van Howe. Bowie,…