This weekend, Bob Dylan will be honored with a Nobel Prize in Literature at a ceremony in Sweden. He won't be attending, but he will be providing a speech to be read on his behalf, and Patti Smith will perform Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." So for today's 9:30 Coffee Break, what Bob Dylan songs and covers do you want to hear?

Atmosphere, “A Long Hello” “After a forever of running around the world and making music, we will now take a month off to sit on the beach of our minds,” Slug says in a recent press release. He and Ant (well, a cardboard cutout) wade into the surf as they bid you “A Long Hello.”…

“We wrote the lyrics in, like, 45 minutes,” Lydia Liza told Andrea Swensson this week when she and Josiah Lemanski visited our studios to sing their new version of the holiday standard “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” The two never guessed that their recording would become a viral hit, resonating with listeners around the world who disliked…

We're thinking about John Lennon today, who was shot and killed on this day in 1980. John would have been 76 had his life not been taken 36 years ago. So for today's 9:30 Coffee Break, what John Lennon songs and covers do you want to hear?

Venue news came in the form of a Kehlani show announcement this morning. As the Oakland pop/R&B star gears up to release her album SWEETSEXYSAVAGE on Jan. 27, she rolled out a series of tour dates, including one in Minneapolis on May 6. The venue? “Music Hall FKA Mill City Nights.” Apparently, the Fifth Street space is getting another rebrand; Kehlani’s…

Next Friday, Dec. 16, the Palace Theatre will open its doors to the public for what the City of St. Paul is calling a “sneak peek” at the downtown venue. Mayor Chris Coleman will deliver some remarks and perform a ceremonial unlocking of the doors at 11:30 a.m. Visitors will then “be greeted with hot…

Sean McPherson writes about Darryl 'DMC' McDaniels's powerful memoir 'Ten Ways Not to Commit Suicide.'

As the Mainroom crowd anticipated Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats’ encore last night, they must’ve bellied up to the decibel level of the band itself. “Ohhh – whoa – oh!” they sang — hollered, really, as they resuscitated the Night Sweats’ wails from “S.O.B.” Everyone had gathered for The Current’s holiday show, and when the…

I was walking through Manhattan recently, making my way up 5th Avenue to check out all the Christmas displays like a typical Midwestern tourist, when I looked up and realized something odd: I was standing at the foot of the Empire State Building, an instantly recognizable spire that I had been eyeing for blocks. But…

If you could buy stock in musical reputations, Stevie Nicks’s would have been a bargain investment 20, 10, even five years ago. In the ’70s, the behemoth popularity of Fleetwood Mac blinded a lot of too-cool-for-school critics to the fact that the band’s accessible and sonically pristine creations were underpinned by timeless songcraft, while Nicks’s…