Mall of America‘s fourth floor is temporarily home to the bass drum Ringo Starr played on The Ed Sullivan Show and John Lennon’s first pair of yellow-tinted spectacles, but the most eye-popping exhibit for many Minnesota music fans will be the sign painted on the wall across from Cantina #1: a giant blue-and-white 400 Bar logo,…

It is not surprising that Minneapolis, the largest city in a state known for its Swedish immigrants, was the first of many First Aid Kit shows to sell out this tour season. Something about the Swedish duo’s Americana sound is clearly appealing, and their show at Dinkytown’s Varsity Theater was packed to the gills with…

Bruce Springsteen’s album Born in the U.S.A. was released 30 years ago today: June 4, 1984. Here are some facts you can drop when the anniversary comes up around the water cooler. The album is Springsteen’s most successful, selling 15 million copies. That number puts it in the company of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, Journey’s greatest hits,…

Bob Mould: Beauty & Ruin “Bob Mould‘s new album Beauty & Ruin may very well be the most epic emotional rollercoaster ever pressed into 36 minutes,” writes the Current’s Mary Lucia in her review of the album that’s released today. “Well into his fourth decade as a singer-songwriter, Mould is as relevant, ferocious and poignant as he…

Now that June is here, at the Current we’re thinking about the songs of the summer. Not in the sense of perennial summer songs (Beach Boys, Mungo Jerry), but in the sense of this summer’s songs. What songs will be the must-have selections on BBQ playlists and road trip mixes? What songs, when you hear them…

It’s graduation season, which means that we’re saying thanks and good luck to some of the college students who have been writing for our Local Current blog. As a salute to these talented young writers, we wanted to tell you a little more about this relatively new program at the Current. For the past several…

There’s an especially wide range of Minnesota music in this week’s Friday Five, from a couple of bumping hip-hop tracks that will require earmuffs for the little ones to a gorgeous Magnetic Fields cover and a touching tribute to the late Zach Sobiech. BdotCroc featuring Rocky Diamonds: “Grind Don’t Stop” If Northside up-and-comer BdotCroc isn’t…

Dessa is no stranger to interviews. Now, though, she’s asking the questions instead of answering them—as the host of The Lowertown Line. Each half-hour episode of The Lowertown Line—a Twin Cities Public Television show that launched late in 2012—features one artist, mixing live performance footage with these intimate interviews. “The show really centers around diverse…

The return to the stage of Steve Perry—frontman of Journey during the band’s years as 80s rock gods—would have been headline-worthy under any circumstances, given that Perry hadn’t given a public performance in two decades. The manner in which it happened, though, has made Perry’s re-emergence a topic of water-cooler conversation all week. The story…

Down in the basement of Minneapolis’s Twin Town Guitars, a scientist named KJ has been at work for 14 years. When I visited Kris Johnson, 38, in his basement office last week, the first thing I noticed were the instruments on his back wall. Johnson named them off for me: multimeter, oscilloscope (“the most gratifying…