Tim Sommer has lived many lives in the service of music, and his upcoming book, Dispatches From the Kingdom of Outsiders explores his experiences through several avenues. It portrays a “nation built by lonely, weird young people who found their first true home in a Sex Pistols 45 or a picture of David Bowie.”

Part memoir, part cultural criticism, this collection “documents a vanished era when knowledge was precious currency and a T-shirt was a flare sent up to find fellow survivors.” Sommer worked for MTV News and in A&R at Atlantic Records, among other gigs, and has also written music biographies. The book arrives from Trouser Press Books on August 4th, 2026.

Billy Idol says of the collection:

Tim Sommer goes deep on a whole century of rock and pop culture, from Bowie to Buddy Bolden, Spike Milligan to Taylor Swift, and everything in between. Punk was always a state of mind as much as a sound or a look, and this book is punk AF.

Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth says about Sommer and his book:

It’s entirely fitting that Tim Sommer’s college radio program was entitled Noise The Show as it’s the SOUND, the NOISE, the music of the city that he was so enchanted by; music and noise signified the magic dynamism of his reality. Initially it’s the urban cacophony of punk and hardcore which inspires Tim to stage dive headfirst into its communitarian clutch but eventually it would also be the experimental sounds of the avant-garde intriguing his rapacious receptors. Whether we heard Tim shouting out the latest Necros single on air, or read a think piece of his on Alan Vega or Mia Zapata, there would always be gleaned an intellect of considered and conversational gravitas. It was the pleasure of noise, be it from the margins or from the mainstream, that inspired Tim to pontificate so excitedly. While his “dispatches” are modestly critical and discerning they are essentially informed by joy, an aspect of shared dialogue utterly welcoming and one the world necessitates now more than ever.