How To Prepare for the Past
Travels In Music and Time
Published on 11. June 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
256 pages
979-8-9886701-0-0 (ISBN)
Description
Writer and musician Brian Cullman's rapturous evocation of life in the bike lane, before the world was digital, when music was everything and magic was everywhere, encompassing friendships with Lester Bangs, Nick Drake, Big Joe Turner, Tim Hardin, and Paul Bowles.
When people asked Brian Cullman his favourite song, he would say the radio.
It was all one sound. It was all one song: the drums and the words, the words without words, the rhythm and the static and the joy and amplified tears.
TV was a clunky box in the corner, nothing but images on a screen telling the same story over and over. The stories were old and small, over before they began. Yesterday's gossip and twice cold toast. They gave him nothing.
But Smokey Robinson crying like a flower with a hangover, The Ronettes, so carnivorous & tender, the sound of eternity in bed with the night: this was love and death and a ticket to places the buses don't go. These were the dreams of the dead, the regrets of the living, stolen prayers from the broken church where God & The Devil relax after work and trade places. He went to sleep to it, woke up to it. The idiot announcers and jingles and calls from New Jersey, the news and guitars, all one. He wanted to walk in it, dance in it.
When people asked Brian Cullman his favourite song, he would say the radio.
It was all one sound. It was all one song: the drums and the words, the words without words, the rhythm and the static and the joy and amplified tears.
TV was a clunky box in the corner, nothing but images on a screen telling the same story over and over. The stories were old and small, over before they began. Yesterday's gossip and twice cold toast. They gave him nothing.
But Smokey Robinson crying like a flower with a hangover, The Ronettes, so carnivorous & tender, the sound of eternity in bed with the night: this was love and death and a ticket to places the buses don't go. These were the dreams of the dead, the regrets of the living, stolen prayers from the broken church where God & The Devil relax after work and trade places. He went to sleep to it, woke up to it. The idiot announcers and jingles and calls from New Jersey, the news and guitars, all one. He wanted to walk in it, dance in it.
Reviews / Votes
"Brian Cullman always knew where the great music was hidden and writes about it with wit and elegance. His descriptions of close encounters with Nick Drake, Big Joe Turner, the Master Musicians of Jajouka, and so many others are as good as music reportage gets."-Joe Boyd, producer and author of And the Roots of Rhythm Remain
"A fantastic memoir of a lifelong love affair with music, intertwined with recollections of a time when Music functioned as a Power in the Earth. Cullman's recollections are written from a wry, wise, and witty vantage point: that of an undaunted, participating witness to an extraordinary time in history. A great book."
-Vernon Reid
"Brian Cullman has found himself at the very inside of so many of music's defining moments that his place as a discerning observer gives way to a kind of unguarded poetry that never fails to lift everyone out of the drabness of this world. What an artist!"
-Youssou N'Dour
"Each of the pieces [performs] a kind of synesthetic magic. Each presents a scene, often no longer to read than it takes to listen to a standard blues or folk ballad and just as tight . . . The result is that his life, as it unfurls in these pages, is transformed into a long chorale of minutely observed encounters with music, musicians, and the places that once nurtured them . . . Some of the vignettes . . . in their mix of eroticism, grit, and glimpses of ultimate transcendence, recall the best short stories of Leonard Michaels . . . Taken together, however, the whole collection creates, in prose, something akin to Cullman's own holy grail as a music lover, a mystic reverberation at once bluesy, folksy, minor-keyed, melancholy, and tousled with transcendent resonance."
-Tablet Magazine
"One way, this is about how artists make the good stuff: they sell blood and brain cells and hang and hustle and remember the best parts, fight in the studios and sleep in the hallways. But behind everything is a deeply, casually stylish secret autobiography, of a musician and writer smart enough to find the meaning in the moment, over and over, for decades. A life in the arts."
-R.J. Smith, author of Chuck Berry: An American Life
"True coolness. A revelation."
-Danny Fields
"Brian Cullman knows music from the inside out, as performer, scribe, and keen observer of those who make wonder out of soundwaves. His new collection of tales is a candid earwitness account of artisans and their process, personal and revelatory."
-Lenny Kaye
"It's like finding a secret diary, with every chapter peeling back a layer of the defining pop years. Seen through the eyes of someone who has lived it and survived. A must-read!"
-Beat Magazine, April 2026 Book of the Month
"A downtown NYC Almost Famous by a de-facto rock critic godfather, though he was other things, too. Literary, elliptical, electric, hilarious, these are snapshots of a disappeared world, and they're as good as music journalism gets."
-Will Hermes, author of Lou Reed: The King of New York and Love Goes to Buildings On Fire
"Wherever you found yourself, The Bottom Line, Tottenham Court Road, Miss Cranston's tea shop in Glasgow, Brian was there at the epicentre of everything. He saw and heard some things and we are lucky to be able to read about them."
-Linda Thompson
"Brian has always been drawn to the most elect and unusual people. He opened for one of Nick Drake's rare live concerts, sang back-up for Sandy Denny, burrowed in with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, talked record-making with George Martin and so much more. These vignettes are so beautifully written-worldly, poetic, full of curiosity and confidence while inviting the reader along as a companion. I cannot imagine hanging out with a wiser guide."
-Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
With flaps
Illustrations
B&W photos throughout; 15 Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 157 mm
Width: 228 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
390 gr
ISBN-13
979-8-9886701-0-0 (9798988670100)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Brian Cullman is a writer & musician based in New York and in France. He has written extensively for The Paris Review, Antaeus, Rolling Stone & The Village Voice and has won the ASCAP/Deems Taylor award for excellence in music journalism three times. He has three solo albums on Sunnyside and is currently a member of Lisbon-based group Rua Das Pretas. He lives in NYC.