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…

Before taking the stage at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in St. Paul, Minn., on May 6, 2014, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age sat down for an informal conversation with The Current's Jill Riley.

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…

Our sister station, MPR News, is presenting the inaugural Top Coast Festival this weekend, where big ideas meet new solutions. Among the keynote speakers is Russell Simmons, a master entrepreneur and visionary.

Let's put together a list of songs with parentheses in the title. What do you want to hear?

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…

So, what songs should we play that either are about laughing or feature actual laughter? Give us your suggestions and we'll play a few for the 9:30 Coffee Break.

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…

The Current is proud to announce the lineup of its third annual MN Music-on-a-Stick showcase at the Minnesota State Fair: Cloud Cult, Bob Mould, Doomtree, Brother Ali, Har Mar Superstar, and the Cactus Blossoms will take the Grandstand stage on Saturday, August 30. The MN Music-on-a-Stick series, presented by the Current, gives fans a chance…

Mayda: Busy Signals Part 1 As a pre-teen, Mayda confined herself to a cabin in northern Minnesota and taught herself how to play songs by Nirvana and the Beatles. Rather than the soft woodsy indie rock of fellow cabin-dwellers Bon Iver, however, Mayda developed a ferocious, urban, and multidimensional sound that packs punch after punch.…