Tuesday night in London was miserable. It was pouring rain and there was a strike that closed the Tube, but it got much more interesting when rumblings started on Twitter that Prince would be playing the Electric Ballroom in the eclectic North London neighborhood of Camden at 3:00 a.m. Immediately, there was a line outside…

To many, it seemed far-fetched when the Awl named Minnesota the single most influential state in American music. That seems like a stretch even to me—unless you adjust for population, we surely can’t hold a candle in sheer weight of history to New York or California—but this past week, Minnesota artists have been so omnipresent…

In their ongoing quest to play every mid-level city in the U.S. besides their hometown of Minneapolis, the reunited Replacements—which features founding members Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson backed by session musicians—have been added to the bill for Atlanta’s Shaky Knees Fest, which takes place May 9-11, 2014. Other acts on the Shaky Knees lineup…

“Drone Not Drones” is a phrase that became locally infamous when Alan Sparhawk spoke it after his band Low played a single, droning song—”Do You Know How to Waltz?”—for their entire 28-minute set at 2013’s Rock the Garden. The phrase was coined by Luke Heiken, who stopped by the Current’s studios to talk with Steve…

Minneapolis rock club the 400 Bar—which shuttered in early 2013 after decades of hosting live music on the West Bank—announced today that it will be reborn as a new music venue on the fourth floor of the Mall of America. In addition to providing a 1,000-capacity space for concerts (which puts it in the same…

Jeremy Messersmith, Heart Murmurs As the delicate strings and palm-muted riff in the first bars of “It’s Only Dancing” give way to an orchestral explosion, it becomes clear that this Jeremy Messersmith is not the whimsical folkie we have come to know. Heart Murmurs, out today, represents a shift toward ambitious pop production underneath sweet, personal…

Many Current listeners have probably heard my song “Lady, You Shot Me.” It’s the first song I wrote for my 2013 album Bye Bye 17 and it was born out of my obsession with Sam Cooke. A few years ago I was on tour with GAYNGS, and a bunch of us had gone on a…

How’s it going out there? This is kind of a trying time of year, isn’t it? I hope you are staying warm and sane as this winter puts us through one endurance test after another. To fight off the winter brainfreeze, I rounded up a handful of the best and brightest videos (sometimes literally—that sunshine…

For one cold night every January in Minneapolis, the big black stage in First Avenue’s Mainroom becomes a testing ground for some of the area’s buzziest new acts. As fledgling bands from around the Twin Cities (and one from Duluth!) took turns crossing the “Play First Ave” item off their bucket list, more than a…

“I spent 229 days at sea in 2013,” Tom Franek told me. “I know—I just did my taxes.” When we spoke last week, I was sitting at the Current’s snow-crusted St. Paul studios, and Franek was in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. We’d arranged a conversation via satellite phone so that Franek could tell…