Brett Gleason

From Brooklyn via Long Island, the solo singer/songwriter Brett Gleason merges Trent Reznor’s dark electronic intensity with Ben Folds’s sincere, piano-driven pop. His lyrics, candid and intensely autobiographical reflections on external obstacles, mirror the shifting dynamics of his musical settings. He first appeared with the 2009 release The Dissonance, presented a more developed and polished approach on the 2014 album Brett Gleason, and reached deeper levels of self-examination on 2023’s Prophecy.

Brett Gleason spent his childhood in Huntington, New York. A palate injury sustained in toddlerhood produced a pronounced speech impediment that left only his mother and sister able to comprehend his words for several years. Isolation prompted the boy to embrace music both as an expressive outlet and as a solitary pursuit. He mastered multiple instruments; during adolescence, classical piano lessons and competitive gymnastics dominated his schedule. Songwriting began at age 13, the same period when a bipolar-disorder diagnosis arrived and he recognized his identity as a gay man—an early relationship with an HIV-positive partner left a lasting mark.

He pursued music studies at the Long Island School for the Arts before enrolling at New York’s New School University, where his focus remained on composition and writing. Although he had long performed, composed, and recorded privately, Gleason waited until 2009 to give his debut concert, choosing to wait for a finished recording he felt ready to share. That five-track EP, The Dissonance, appeared on his own label weeks after the performance; a second EP, The Thawing, followed in 2012. His first full-length album, the self-titled Brett Gleason, surfaced in 2014. He wrote each of its eight songs, produced the sessions, and performed every instrument except drums, which were supplied by Brendan Finnegan. The track “I Am Not” logged twenty weeks in the Top Ten of Logo’s music-video program The Click List. The Manifest arrived in 2017 with ten original compositions. In 2020 the three-song single “Jealousy” was issued in a limited physical run of one hundred copies. Meridian/ECR Music Group released Prophecy in 2023; its single “A Sign” was captured during sessions spanning New York, Philadelphia, and Gleason’s adopted home of Los Angeles, yielding some of his most candid and sharply observed material to date.