Dave Grohl will be the official ambassador of this year’s Record Store Day on April 18. Grohl follows Jack White and Chuck D, previous Record Store Day ambassadors, and will release Songs from the Laundry Room—a four-track 10″ EP featuring unreleased material by Foo Fighters—to celebrate the annual day dedicated to vinyl. (AV Club) Barry Manilow will get permanently off…

See also: A California desert interview with Babes in Toyland   There is a hazy, dreamlike quality to Palm Springs, California, a 1950s time capsule of a resort town that was once the stomping grounds of Hollywood stars like Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Elvis Presley, Liberace, and Sammy Davis, Jr. The city has been preserved…

It’s obvious that fans have already embraced the concept of Justin Vernon’s new Eaux Claires Festival, coming to Eau Claire, Wis., on July 17 and 18, 2015. The festival, which Vernon is curating along with help from the National’s Aaron Dessner, quickly sold out of presale tickets before a single performer was revealed, and a unique rollout of…

Rolling Stone digs into Bob Dylan‘s long speech accepting his MusiCares Person of the Year award, but even they can’t understand why, after thanking many artists, Dylan chose to dis Merle Haggard by saying “Merle Haggard didn’t think much of my songs…I love Merle but he’s no Buck [Owens].” The remark seems inexplicable, since Dylan and Haggard…

Fitness: Witness Some Wisconsin and University of Minnesota alumni have put their garage-rock tunes into their very cohesive debut Witness. Fitness recorded their album in under three weeks in the basement of a university library while hanging out over Christmas break. That gives you a sense of the band’s aesthetic, but their sound isn’t hidden under a pile…

Going into its sixth year as a music festival in Winona, Mid West Music Fest (MWMF) promises three days of live performances, along with educational presentations and family friendly activities from April 23-25. This year’s festival will feature headliner Charlie Parr—who has performed every year at MWMF since 2011—as well as DJ Abilities, Chastity Brown, Communist Daughter,…

This Valentine’s week we’re pleased to premiere the song and video “Nervous Butterfly,” a complex romantic song by the busy and talented local rapper Botzy. It’s the latest taste of his forthcoming album Still Not Dead Yet, to be released April 21 on Polkadot Mayhem; “Ate Me” dropped last fall. Read more about Botzy’s roots in Andrea…

Although Kanye West stopped short of actually yanking the Best Album Grammy out of Beck‘s hands, he still thinks it should have gone to Beyoncé—and what’s more, he thinks Beck should hand the statuette over. “When you keep on diminishing art and not respecting the craft and smacking people in their face after they deliver monumental feats of…

When creating his musical mash-up series, late-night host Jimmy Kimmel knew he had to find someone stupendously talented and devilishly good-looking to perform with the sisters of Haim. Obviously, it had to be the legendary Morris Day, who joined the California trio on Kimmel’s show last night with the Time to perform the classic “Jungle Love.”…

The Replacements have added steam to their comeback by announcing a spring tour that will stop in a dozen cities across the U.S. in April and May, starting in Seattle and ending in Philadelphia. The tour includes no Minnesota dates, but with this amount of activity as well as rumors of a new album, it…