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. “Each of the pieces [performs] a kind of magic. Each presents a scene, no longer to read than it takes to listen to a standard blues or folk ballad and just as tight...
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, the whole collection creates something akin to Cullman’s own holy grail, a mystic reverberation at once bluesy, folksy, minor-keyed, melancholy, and tousled with transcendent resonance.”
—Tablet Magazine
“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
This reads like a travelogue at points – but one that is fizzy, deeply personal and quite possibly one of the best books you’ll read about music for a good long while.
—JoE Silva, Tracking Angle
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
“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
