Urban Lights Music: The Black-Owned Saint Paul Record Store That’s Been Minnesota’s Creative Heartbeat for Over 30 Years

Urban Lights Music — Minnesota’s only Black-owned record store and one of just 32 in the entire United States — has been a fixture on University Avenue in Saint Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood since 1993. That’s over three decades of flipping crates, building community, and proving that a record store can be something much bigger than a place to buy music.

Owner Timothy Wilson was always destined for this. His high school locker, by his own description, was literally a record store. He started DJing in 9th grade and never stopped. As a teenager, he spent hours in the space that would one day become his — then called Northern Lights — listening to records, soaking up the culture, building a relationship with music so deep that store managers would ask him which new releases would sell. When the original owner decided to sell in 1993, Wilson and a group of friends pooled their money together, bought the store, and renamed it Urban Lights. “We wanted to be just a light in the urban community, in the neighborhood,” Wilson says. More than 30 years later, that light is still on.

Urban Lights has outlasted big-box music retailers, survived the 2008 recession, kept its doors open through a global pandemic — when loyal clients bought gift cards and merchandise just to keep the store alive — and stood firm when businesses around University Avenue were targeted during the 2020 Uprising. The walls are blanketed floor-to-ceiling in posters and album covers, old and new, a Rorschach test for every person who walks in: you see your memory, your era, your soundtrack.

The inventory spans vinyl records, CDs, merchandise, and customized items — from $3 rarities to $50 collector’s pieces — with particular depth in Hip-Hop, R&B, Soul, Gospel, Blues, Jazz, and Oldies. Vinyl is the heartbeat. Wilson also fills iPods and MP3 players with curated playlists built around a mood, a party, or a moment in someone’s life. He describes his palette as “so deep” — rooted in the Maze, Ohio Players, Cameo, and Earth Wind & Fire his aunt and uncle played, expanded through decades of DJing, and always open to everything.

But Urban Lights is not just a record store. It is, as Wilson puts it, an open house for creatives. Open mic nights, DJ battles, poetry and spoken word, block parties, DJ events every Saturday, pop-up shops supporting local Black-owned businesses, photoshoots, music videos, podcast recordings, and TV productions have all found a home here. Wilson teaches young people music production, mixing, mastering, and sound design — giving them technical skills alongside stage time. Artists have come through to sign autographs and hang out. The city’s most dedicated music heads know this place as their institution.

“Sometimes you have to get off the main highway,” Wilson says. Urban Lights Music is where you end up when you do.

theurbanlightsmusic.com · @theurbanlight