When Beto O’Rourke and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota served in Congress together in the 2010s, they would go on early morning jogs and talk about their shared love of music from Minnesota, from icons like Bob Dylan and Prince to the indie rock ferment the Twin Cities produced in the 1980s, including the Replacements and Hüsker Dü.
“Music would come up a lot,” Mr. O’Rourke recalled of those runs when they were both serving on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. (He also said that Mr. Walz, a native Nebraskan, seemed impervious to Washington winters, wearing T-shirts and shorts.)
Mr. Walz’s affinity for rock comes up often enough, vouched for by enough sources, to appear deep-seated. By all appearances, the governor, whom Vice President Kamala Harris selected on Tuesday as her running mate, truly loves his dad rock.
Three years ago Mr. Walz wished Bob Dylan — born in Duluth, raised in Hibbing — a happy 80th birthday on social media, identifying “Forever Young” as a favorite Dylan tune (Walz posted the slow version, not the up-tempo one). Last year Mr. Walz used purple ink to sign a law honoring the Minneapolis native Prince, the artist behind the 1984 album and movie “Purple Rain,” by renaming a stretch of Highway 5 the “Prince Rogers Nelson Memorial Highway.”
Mr. Walz periodically texts about upcoming rock concerts in the Twin Cities or Mr. O’Rourke’s hometown, El Paso. “I love that he has got one of the most intense jobs in the world, all these things on his plate, but he finds time to reach out, to listen to music, to go to concerts,” Mr. O’Rourke, a onetime presidential hopeful, said in an interview.
Mr. Walz, 60, is also a fan of Bruce Springsteen. Patrick Murphy, a former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania who at one point was Mr. Walz’s roommate in Washington, recalled how Mr. Walz urged him to delve deeper into the Springsteen catalog.
“For me, it was ‘Born in the U.S.A.,’ ‘Thunder Road,’” Mr. Murphy said in an interview, citing two gigantic, and perhaps predictable, Springsteen hits.
Mr. Walz’s reply? “Dude, you’ve got to check out ‘Nebraska’ — ‘Reason to Believe,’” said Mr. Murphy, recalling Mr. Walz’s fondness for Mr. Springsteen’s sparse 1982 album and its closing track.
Like Ms. Harris, who was photographed at a record store in Washington last year with a trove of LPs by jazz greats, Mr. Walz is a fan of vinyl. A few years ago Mr. Walz posted photos to Facebook of himself and his daughter listening to fellow Midwesterners John Mellencamp and Bob Seger on vinyl. Last December Mr. Walz displayed a haul of LPs from the Minneapolis record store Electric Fetus — where retail clerks recognize him as a regular, Aaron Meyerring, a co-owner, said in an interview. (Mr. Walz’s press office did not comment for this article.)
Mr. Walz caught a Springsteen show last year at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey said in an interview that he and his wife, Tammy, had invited Mr. Walz — “we knew he was a huge Boss fan,” Mr. Murphy said — and that Mr. Walz had brought Mr. O’Rourke as his guest (Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, another potential running mate on Ms. Harris’s short list, also attended as Mr. Murphy’s guest).
At dinner before the show, Mr. O’Rourke said, he and Mr. Walz discussed an upcoming remastered version of the Replacements’ 1985 album that is named, of all things, “Tim.”
When the new “Tim” came out, Mr. O’Rourke mailed it to Mr. Walz — on vinyl, of course. Mr. Walz replied with an appreciative text.
Bob Mould, the former Hüsker Dü frontman, said Tuesday that he had only just learned from Mr. O’Rourke’s post on social media that Mr. Walz knew his band’s music. “I’m pretty speechless,” he said. “I was doing a happy dance.”
Michael Azerrad, whose 2001 history of indie rock “Our Band Could Be Your Life” has chapters on both the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, said in an interview that Mr. Walz’s appreciation for such bands signaled a changing of the generational guard, as Mr. Walz, like Ms. Harris, was born in 1964, at the dawn of Generation X.
“It makes sense,” Azerrad said, “that our post-Boomer politicians would be into indie rock.”
Read More: Tim Walz: Governor, Vice-Presidential Candidate, Local Music Fan
