Liner Notes - James Brubaker

Praise for Liner Notes

In Liner Notes, James Brubaker has assembled a two-sided collection of stories that feature both fact and fiction. These music-inspired narratives remind us that ‘songs are time’ and when we lay the tracks of our past down on thirty-nine seconds or three minutes of a melody, the result is both a remembering and an imagining. Here is a stunning debut by a writer who understands the longing we all share and the songs that bring every last good thing back.

~ JILL TALBOT

The stories in James Brubaker’s Liner Notes are extraordinary, with lines that recall Ben Marcus and Gabriel Blackwell. It’s amazing what Brubaker’s fiction does with language and the obsession with music, sound, and pop culture. An erudite work of avant-garde fiction, with cameos by Phil Spector, Albert Ayler, Brian Wilson, Flavor Flav, and a beautiful woman named Yoko, Brubaker’s brilliant fiction is like listening to your favorite album on vinyl: deeply moving and very, very smart.

~ BRANDON HOBSON

This fun, smart collection of short stories beats with a pure heart of rock and roll. Whether it is the one about the rock writer haunted down the years by a band he heard once when he was young, the scientist who turns away from his efforts to catalogue all melodies, the boy who survives his dysfunctional parents by listening to Thriller, or the widower who searches for the perfect song to eulogize his wife, these stories never let up in their efforts to show how rock and roll can clarify a life, embody a memory, crystallize a wordless emotion, and create a refuge from the world. Brubaker understands as few do that to listen to music is nothing short of time travel. You should let him transport you.

~ CONSTANCE SQUIRES