Click to view slideshow.

Record Store Day Highlights, St. Paul & Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 2015, photos © 2015 by QuoinMonkey & Liz Anne Schultz. All rights reserved.

We made a day of it for Record Store Day, venturing across the river to two stores in St. Paul we had not visited before: Agharta Records (named after the Miles Davis album) and Eclipse Records on Wabasha. One thing I miss about shopping for albums in brick and mortar stores is the camaraderie among fellow music lovers. Agharta did not disappoint. We struck up a conversation with one of the DJs about the documentary Searching for Sugar Man. It turned out he had interviewed Rodriguez and hung out with him for a day; we left the store with a great story and Cold Fact in vinyl.

Later we stopped by Hymie’s Vintage Records where we entered a packed house for Chastity Brown and caught Pennyroyal’s last gig. Our final stop was Mill City Sound in Hopkins, but they were closed for the day. We ended up at Nacho’s Supermercado where I consumed one of the best burritos I’ve ever had.

Vinyl is alive and well. And if you subscribe to Neil Young’s belief that current digital formats produce only about “5 percent” of the sound that vinyl records do because the data is so compressed, Record Store Day is a good time to start your vinyl collection again.

Filed under: Culture, Music, Photography Tagged: #RSD15, Agharta Records, building community through the Arts, Chastity Brown, Eclipse Records, Hymie's Vintage Records, Mill City Sound, Pennyroyal, record collections, Record Store Day, record stores, Rodriguez, Searching for Sugar Man, St. Paul & the Broken Bones, vinyl