Journalist, musician and songwriter Jim Walsh loves both music and Minneapolis. Over the years, he has written about the people, the places and the music that he has encountered in the Twin Cities area. In Bar Yarns & Manic-Depressive Mixtapes: Jim Walsh on Music from Minneapolis to the Outer Limits, he offers a collection of 69 of his past columns from local newspapers, dating from 1987 to 2016. Most of the selections come from the most recent years. Walsh allows us to follow along vicariously in his footsteps and to see what he has seen. And he's sure seen a lot.

Walsh sifts through his concert reviews, interviews and chance meetings, and moves among a variety of performers. Some, you'll know: Jackson Browne, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, U2, R.E.M., George Clinton, Roseanne Cash and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. Even Britney Spears and Yoko Ono. Other groups and singer-songwriters may not be familiar to you, like Alex Chilton and Big Star, Bob "Slim" Dunlap, Joe Henry, Ike Reilly, Tin Star Sisters, the Waterboys, Joel Bremer, Uncle Tupelo, Jay Farrar and Son Volt, and the Belfast Cowboys (led by Walsh's older brother, Terry).

Most obvious are Walsh's intersections with two separate, local and notable music-makers: the Replacements and Prince. Walsh has written so extensively on both that he has published books about them. He has earned an encyclopedic knowledge of many musicians, from the bar bands to the stars. He understands not only who they are, but where they will perform or where they will simply hang out. He also celebrates the openings and mourns the closings of the city's bars and clubs that provided signature venues for the music to happen.

Of course, the field of music is about people, emotions and sharing the common human experience. Such a book would be incomplete without tributes to some of the individuals we have lost over the years. Walsh includes his memories of Clarence Clemons, Kurt Cobain, Elvis, Bob Marley and Joey Ramone, as well as of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone.

We also get to meet members of Walsh's large family on these pages, most noticeably toward the beginning of the book. After all, he gained some of his musical appreciation from his siblings and from his parents. And once they are introduced, we watch them pop up in other stories.

Among the most entertaining of Walsh's columns is "Singing in Your Sleep," which outlines the technique of producing a terrific mixtape -- back in the day when we did this, with cassettes. (I don't know about you, but I still have one that a friend in high school gave me in the early 1970s.) Both the book title and the cover art hint at the importance of this topic here. In fact, if you look closer at the table of contents and to the layout of the chapters, you'll discover that the material is arranged as if the whole book is a mixtape. How clever!

It's all too easy to grow jealous of Walsh. Imagine the ultimate validation of writing a concert review and getting a nice handwritten note in return from the performer himself, after he read your work. Walsh doesn't have to imagine this. He got such a note from Bruce Springsteen. (To which this reviewer asks, "Where's MINE, Bruce? I wrote a glowing review from the same concert tour in 2007, and you didn't write to ME.")

If you're a Twin Cities resident, you'll "get" everything that Walsh shows us here. Bar Yarns can also introduce non-Minnesotans to the thriving cultural scene that flows through the neighborhoods. But even if you've never ventured into the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, you'll still find interesting accounts and common ground here: especially if you too were a young person in the late '70s and early '80s. Music, culture and "growing up" connections abound. You may nod with recognition at least a few times as you turn these pages.

Jim Walsh is an excellent writer and an observer who meets engaging discoveries at almost every turn. His second collection of general columns, Fear & Loving in South Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), provides even more meetings with the locals, with Walsh's family, and with artists like Prince. Here's hoping that he lands upon even more stories to share with the rest of us.

NOTE: I met and chatted with the author, and he gave me a free copy of this book, without any request or obligation to write a review. Thanks, Jim!