Brook Pridemore came to New York in 2002, straight out of college, and learned the trade at the Monday Anti-Hootenanny at the Sidewalk Cafe, the East Village open stage at the centre of antifolk. A run of albums for the Bronx label Crafty Records followed, starting with Metal and Wood in 2003. Then the label folded. “Listening to TPM” comes from the record Pridemore made next, Gory Details, a set of songs finished in the winter of 2011 and, by their own account, inspired by one woman.
The band that had played those songs live, billed as Brook Pridemore’s Gory Details, broke up while Pridemore was touring Europe, and for a while the album was nearly going to be solo and acoustic. Instead the sessions brought back John Telethon on guitar and Doug “Bermuda” Johnson on drums, with Pope James Gibson Telfer IV, whom Pridemore had seen playing upright bass one night. Brian Speaker recorded them slowly, over about six months, and they finished in February 2012. Every song was written in a key related to the one before it. On “Listening to TPM”, Matt Colbourn adds trumpet and Joe Michelini of the New Jersey band River City Extension is the featured guest. The lyric stands its subject on a darkened beach in Seaside Heights, concedes that “The Boss is always right”, and keeps insisting that “every last little thing’s gonna be alright”.
With the album done and no label to put it out, Pridemore decided to make a video for every song on it, and by August 2013 eight had been shot. The one for “Listening to TPM”, directed by Pridemore and shot and edited by Justin Remer, went up on YouTube on 23 July 2012. That December the song turned up on I Heart Hurricane Relief, a 20-track compilation whose proceeds went to Occupy Sandy.
Gory Details finally came out on Pridemore’s own imprint in 2014, opening and closing with a single strum of a D chord. Pridemore has kept releasing their own records since, from Breakup Songs, With Horns (2017) to Only I Can Prevent Forest Fires (2026). “Listening to TPM” is what came of losing a label and a band in the same stretch: a trumpet, a guest from River City Extension, and a video made while the record still had nowhere to go.
