Brian Cullman is a writer & musician based in New York and in France. He has written extensively for The Paris Review, Antaeus, Rolling Stone, and 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.
‘How to Prepare for the Past’ reflects on lessons learned from rock stars and literary legends.
If you transcribed the kind of daydream where you visit a bygone era and insert yourself into historic circumstances, it might turn out a little like Brian Cullman’s new How to Prepare for the Past. But only if you had the same sort of gift for poetic prose as Cullman.
“When people asked me
my favorite song, I would say the radio.”
But Smokey Robinson crying in the night like a flower with a hangover, The Ronettes, so carnivorous and 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; the dreams of the dead, the regrets of the living, stolen prayers from the broken church where God and the Devil relax after work and trade places.
I went to sleep to it, woke up to it. The idiot announcers and jingles and calls from New Jersey, the news, and the drums and guitars, all one. How can I choose my favorite part of the rain? I wanted to walk in it, dance in it. Get wet. When people asked me my favorite song, I would just say the radio.
When people asked me my favorite song, I 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 and over before they began. Yesterday’s gossip and twice-cold toast. They gave me nothing.
Praise for How to
Prepare for the Past
“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, record 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
“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 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 mysticreverberation at once bluesy, folksy, minor-keyed, melancholy, and tousled with transcendent resonance.”
—Tablet Magazine
“ 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
“What an artist!”
— Youssou N’dour
“4 Stars ::::”
— MOJO June 2026