Happy Friday! I don’t know about you, but with the short holiday week and the stressful awesomeness of running from party to work to party, I can barely concentrate today. How are we expected to do anything productive this time of year? About the only thing that gets me through a distracted day like today…

2013 was a spectacular year for roots musicians, filled with innovative albums that harken back to the greats of old and push the boundaries of the genre into new territories. Here are ten fantastic roots albums that might have flown beneath your radar this year. In addition to watching the videos below, you can also…

Year-end lists can seem a little silly, but at the same time there is something really valuable about taking the time to reflect on what you’ve done over the last year. With a holiday-season lull in touring bands coming through the studios, and not too many local releases, I took time to look though all…

All five surviving members of pioneering Minneapolis group Tétes Noires will be together at the Bryant-Lake Bowl tonight for the first time since they disbanded in 1987, thanks to a new remix album helmed by keyboardist Angela Frucci called The New American Dream. On a Minnesota music history timeline, Tétes Noires fall somewhere between the…

Each year we ask our listeners to vote on their favorite songs of the year, and their ballots determine the Top 89 songs we play on New Year’s Eve. This year, we asked some of our favorite local musicians to share their picks as well. If you haven’t submitted your ballot yet, don’t delay! Voting…

Têtes Noires: The New American Dream reissue Active in the mid-80s, Têtes Noires—who regard themselves as Minneapolis’s “first all-female rock band”—were contemporaries of the Replacements, but sang in multi-part vocal harmonies that sounded more like the Andrews Sisters. Three decades later, Têtes Noires are back with a reissue of their 1984 album American Dream, now called…

Billing themselves as “the world’s first country vocal band,” Minneapolis-based a cappella quartet Home Free soared past their competition and finished in first place on NBC’s The Sing-Off, scoring a recording contract with Sony and a $100,000 grand prize. Home Free first formed 13 years ago in Mankato, Minnesota, where the group’s director and baritone,…

It might be the best bargain of the year for Minnesota music fans: seven bucks for seven bands, with not a lemon in the bunch. That’s how the annual Best New Bands showcase, hosted by First Avenue and sponsored by Radio K, works. The lineup for next month’s show—scheduled for January 30, with tickets on…

I don’t know about you, but the thought of stepping into a shopping mall this weekend with everyone losing their minds over last-minute holiday deals makes me want to curl up on the couch take a big old nap. Shopping for records and other musical paraphernalia at local stores, however? That I can handle. If…

If, as a music fan, you know anything about the Coen Brothers’ new film Inside Llewyn Davis, you know that it’s about the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. That is, indeed, the film’s setting—but this quiet, intensely personal film isn’t “about” that scene in the ways you might expect. Though it has elements of parody,…