By: Keith Moerer
Prince fanatic. Cornbread Harris confidante. Minneapolis Sound expert. Author Andrea Swensson embraces a new role: music donor to the Minnesota Music Archive.
To help describe Remembering the Purple One, the new Prince exhibit in downtown Minneapolis, Andrea Swensson employs an analogy only a lifelong resident of the Twin Cities might use: “We kind of think of it as how Dayton’s used to dress up the windows for Christmas. It’s kind of like that but with Prince.”
The exhibit, on display at LaSalle Plaza next to the State Theatre, where a stage production of Purple Rain: The Musical is currently showing, runs through the end of 2025. Co-curated with North Minneapolis Prince collector Rich Benson, Swensson has spent most of this year telling the story of Prince through seven windows adorned with purple velvet drapes and a mix of vintage posters, photos, videos, slide shows, and newspaper clippings. There are four windows on the main level and three more on the Skyway level. There are also 4-by-4 replicas of each of Prince’s album covers on the mirrored walls of the Plaza (that’s feet, not inches, for you Spinal Tap fans), plus enlarged reproductions of pages from Swensson’s 2024 coffee table book, Prince and Purple Rain: 40 Years.
The primary audience for this installation is likely to be Purple Rain playgoers on their way to or from the State Theatre. However, it’s also for anyone heading to an appointment at Park Dental or running late for a reservation at CRAVE. “Anyone can wander by and go see it.” Swensson explains. “There’s no way for us to control how they experience it” – which is part of its beauty. With Benson’s help and the support of Tim Carroll at Hennepin Arts, she’s found a way to tell the story leading up to Prince’s pop-culture triumph “without words but with objects.”
Swensson was still working as host of The Local Show at The Current when Prince died in 2016. “I started covering Prince, and that kind of took over my life.” Besides her glossy coffee table book, she’s also host of the Prince Official Podcast, which over six seasons, has gone deep into the production of classic albums such as 1999 and Sign O’ The Times.
On the day we meet, at a coffee shop in South Minneapolis, she’s dressed in a Kiss the Tiger T-shirt, jeans, and sensible shoes. Vaguely hip but no nonsense.
Her story begins in the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley, where she began taking piano lessons at seven. She knew from an early age that music would be what she calls “a core element in my life.” As a child, she started going to record stores and swap meets with her dad, particularly drawn to obscure vinyl with a connection to Minneapolis or St. Paul. By age 16, she was driving into the Twin Cities, looking for records, hanging out in coffee shops, and devouring the music coverage of Jim Walsh and Jon Bream.
At Hamline University, she was a music major, studying jazz and classical piano, but also flute and bass guitar. She assumed that she was training to become a professional musician. Then she joined the school newspaper and was eventually faced with a choice: spend five hours alone each day, practicing to become the best player she could be, or hang out in the company of others, listening to music, and talking with musicians about what they did.
She dropped out of college and started writing freelance concert reviews for a local blog. This led to her getting hired at City Pages, where she worked as music editor from 2008 through 2012. It was a valuable experience, but a bruising one, with a workload that increased even as her freelance budget shrank. Suffering from anxiety and carpal tunnel, she quit. At 25, she was done with newspapers, but just getting started in her career. She approached The Current, offering to do for the station what she’d been doing at City Pages. This meant concert reviews, social media posts, club listings, and hard news – venue closings, the ceiling collapse at First Avenue, and the deaths of Husker Du co-founder Grant Hart and Prince.
In 2015, she took over as host of The Local Show from her friend and mentor Dave Campbell. She loved the work but hated the job, which involved toiling for long hours without union representation. Then the pandemic hit. “The day we went into lockdown, my boss dropped off a bag of recording equipment on my stoop, and I had to learn how to do everything remotely.” As the mother of an 18-month-old toddler, suddenly without access to day care, it was a particularly daunting challenge. Things got more intense. She quit The Current in 2021, after helping to unionize the staff, and hasn’t looked back. “I’ve not had a boss in four years, and it’s wonderful.”
Her friendship with Cornbread Harris, a 98-year-old local music legend and longtime fixture at Palmer’s Bar, began when she interviewed him on The Local Show. “I invited him to play a session in 2017, and he was so charming and funny and amazing. It stuck with me. I did a lot of sessions, but that one was so special.”
Fast forward a number of years, when she received a message from Harris’ son, one half of the legendary duo Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.
“A month after I left [The Current], Jimmy Jam texted me and said he was coming to town and wanted to see his dad. He asked if I could help,” she recalls. “I thought, huh? How unusual that he’s asking a local DJ, but I helped him, of course. And then he sent a photo of the two of them together and he said, ‘Hey, I just wanted to let you know that it worked out, and this was our first time speaking with each other in 35 years.'”
This experience was the start of their journey together. “I just started crying, felt immediately compelled to do something…I went to visit Cornbread and told him that I was really moved by what transpired, and I want to write a book about you. He said, ‘Come back next week and let’s see how it goes.’ Now it’s been four years, and I still see him every Tuesday. He’s become one of the most meaningful people in my life.”
Although primarily known as a blues pianist, Harris began his recording career in 1955, when he was featured on what is regarded as the first rock and roll record made in Minnesota, Augie Garcia’s “Hi Yo Silver.” It’s rare recordings like this and stories like Harris’ that helped inspire Swensson to donate her collection of 1600 local recordings to the Minnesota Music Archive, so they could be digitized, preserved, and promoted well into the future.
“I’ve been thinking in the back of my mind for years that there’s so much local music that is not on Spotify, that is out of print. Maybe 300 CDs ever got pressed but because of my line of work I ended up with one of these 300 copies. So I’ve felt for a long time that I’ve been collecting something that is special,” Swensson shared with the Minnesota Music Archive. “I never throw anything away. I’ve saved every press release anyone has sent me, every sticker, button, [and] T-shirt that came with the CD. I squirreled it away because I felt someone took the time to make this and try to get their band out in the world and there’s something really sweet to me about that. Maybe this is why I’ve been saving all these things, so it doesn’t just gather dust at my house — that it could actually be heard, experienced by [other] people.”
While Swensson is committed to seeing all the music that she’s collected preserved, she has a soft spot for late ‘60s and ‘70s recordings that were the foundation for what would become the Minneapolis Sound: Willie Walker. Maurice McKinnies. Morris Wilson. “Those early funk records, because they’re so rare, some of those took me six months to find. I really respect those musicians who have never gotten the kind of mainstream acceptance [they deserve].”
Since finishing work on the Remembering the Purple One exhibit in late August, Swensson is primarily focused on two upcoming projects: a coffee table book tied to the 50th anniversary of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors album in 2027, and a short film about Harris that includes footage of his son and pianist Jimmy Jam, speaking and playing keyboards together at the Cedar Cultural Center for the 2024 book release event for Deeper Blues.
It’s a busy schedule for anyone, but especially for a working mother of two daughters, who are now ages seven and two. In her words, she’s already busy “indoctrinating” her older child into her love of the Purple One. Swensson tells MMA that she took her to a Prince dance party for kids at First Avenue and when the band kicked into the first song, Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” her daughter turned to her and said excitedly, “Mama, this is the song from Sing 2!”
She also continues to visit with Harris every Tuesday. They always sit in the same place, with Harris seated at his piano. If he’s feeling up to it, he might play between their chatter. Sometimes Jimmy Jam will join by Zoom, FaceTime, or in person, as he did the day after Harris played his final set at Palmer’s, on its last night in business.
“I don’t think either of us would do well if we skipped it,” Swensson confesses. “Usually I bring him a nice drink. He’s sampled all the fancy sodas he could have. Yesterday he had his first Mocha Frappuccino, that was a big hit. It’s part of our routine.”
Mostly retired now, Keith Moerer has had two careers — one as a music journalist, the other as a tech executive. In the ‘90s, he worked as an editor at Rolling Stone and Request, a long-defunct Minneapolis-based magazine that was distributed nationally. He started at a money-losing book website in 1998, and spent nearly 20 years as a “content executive” at Amazon and Apple, where he launched and managed Apple Books, News, and Podcasting. He regrets not seeing Cornbread Harris at Palmer’s, but vows to redeem himself on Sundays at Schooner Tavern’s Church of Cornbread.