In mid-summer, an open Google Doc started floating around the Twin Cities music scene. It’s a spreadsheet meant as a booking resource where musicians who identify as women, queer, and/or people of color can add their contact info, links to music and “identifying factors” into the appropriate cells. In the “identifying factors” column, dozens of local artists have described how they identify.…

John Berg, a longtime art director for Columbia Records, has died at age 83. Among his most recognizable designs were Bob Dylan‘s Blonde on Blonde and Greatest Hits album covers, and Bruce Springsteen‘s Born to Run. (Rolling Stone) Wayne Coyne says that Miley Cyrus and the Flaming Lips are planning a show where everyone—audience members included—will be completely naked while…

Flamin’ Ohs: Hear and Now EP Dating back to 1977, the Flamin’ Oh’s are classic. I mean, they have a star on First Ave. They’re back again with their newest Here and Now EP. They haven’t released anything from the new from the EP, but you should be able to grab physical copies at their…

After a couple of jam-packed years on the road, Lizzo is getting ready to unleash an artistic masterpiece: The tightly focused, empowering, and inspirational Big GRRRL Small World, which is coming out on her own BGSW label. “When you see the world, you’re able to write about it in a different way. And that’s why…

Today, Greater MSP—a regional economic development partnership for the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area—is launching a new site for its initiative Make It. MSP. The site serves as a welcome mat for everyone in the MSP area, especially newcomers and those who are considering moving to the area. I’ve had the privilege of working with this…

Twin Cities rock legends Hüsker Dü have their first-ever official website. The site is just a merchandise mart—but still, notes the Star Tribune’s Chris Riemenschneider, “marks the first thaw in a glacial ice pack that formed in early 1988, when the influential Minneapolis punk trio broke up.” The band’s bassist Greg Norton tells Reimenschneider that “there’s ongoing communication…

Veteran local record-collector John Kass has recently been in the news for his quest to sell 200,000 of his records at once. David Campbell talked with Kass in an episode of The Local Show last year. Here’s a transcript of their conversation. David Campbell: How is it that in a time when the record industry…

Keyboardist Carey Lander, a member of Camera Obscura since 2002, has died of bone cancer at age 33. In her final months, Lander was actively raising funds to fight osteosarcoma. “It’s probably too late to help me,” she wrote on a JustGiving page, “but it would be great if we could find something in the future that…

I’ll admit that when St. Paul’s History Theatre announced they were going to stage a musical based on the Glensheen murders, I was skeptical. There seemed to be an acute danger of letting the case’s Gothic details—the mansion on the lake, the “board-game weapons” (as one of the characters puts it) used to commit the crimes,…

Thirty-three civilians showed up to Paisley Park late last night. I know there were 33 of us because I ended up having plenty of time to count each and every one of us from left to right, then again from right to left and all the way up to the stage, which was littered with dozens of guitar pedals,…