“My knees shake a lot. People don’t notice it, but I notice it.” Sitting a room away from her second-ever live show, Nissy, an emerging artist from Hopkins, projected joy and nervous energy. Her first performance took place at her junior high’s annual talent show—Nissy is actually a ninth-grader at Hopkins West. Since then, the…

Happy Friday! Here’s your weekly look at the latest Minnesota music videos—including a brand new one from Birthday Suits, which we are pleased to debut at the top of the order today. Birthday Suits With a highly anticipated new album Spin the Bottle: Adult Party due out next month, Birthday Suits sent over this video for the single…

Last week, which included Record Store Day, independent music retailers accounted for 22% of overall physical album sales, which meant 12% of overall music sales when digital downloads are included. That’s the highest share of the market that independent record stores have held in any week since 2003. (Billboard) It’s not official yet, but Alabama…

Winona was recently called (on this blog) a town where “music and adventure [are] undoubtedly akin,” where “a day-long trek through the woods [is] incomplete without Bob Dylan’s ramblings, Frank Ocean’s crooning, or Jimi Hendrix’s electric wails played on a mobile-phone speaker.” Then writer Alex Miller talks about a pass-the-err-guitar session out on the beach while…

If buying Kurt Cobain‘s childhood home ($400,000) is a bit more of a purchase than you can afford to make as a Nirvana fan, instead consider crashing for a night in the L.A. apartment Cobain shared with Courtney Love in 1991 and 1992. It’s on Airbnb, and as you can see, it was truly well-used by the grunge power…

The Esquire Network’s Best Bars in America show has comedians Jay Larson and Sean Patton drinking their way “through neighborhood dives and swanky bars alike” in cities across America. Tonight (April 22), the show spotlights Minneapolis, with Larson and Patton visiting bars including that will include Palmer’s, the Sample Room, the 1029 Bar, Nye’s, the Butcher and…

Los Angeles music blog Grimy Goods has recently compiled a list of the 20 best female drummers. On the list—along with such notables as Dee Plakas of L7 and Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney—is Babes in Toyland’s Lori Barbero, who’s been hitting the skins since 1987. “I think there’s a lot of drummers that have been…

Courtney Barnett is the rare performer who comes across almost exactly like she is in song when she gets off stage. She is witty, sensitive, self-aware, and self-deprecating, comfortable expressing even the most mundane thoughts and ideas right up next to her more profound epiphanies. On her debut full-length, Sometimes I Sit and Think and…

Many artists released limited-edition vinyl on Saturday for Record Store Day—and unsurprisingly, some collectors ran straight for their laptops instead of their turntables, looking to flip their finds on eBay for a quick profit. Stereogum lists ten of the most lucrative, including discs from Bob Dylan, Phish, and Brand New. The single most lucrative record flip Stereogum found,…

There are so many different ways to think about music and how we interact with it. We can enjoy it from a technical perspective, marveling at an artist’s proficiency at their instrument or the way they hit the notes just right. We can examine it intellectually, taking apart each lyric in an attempt to unpack its many meanings. We…