Pleasantville (The Band) Making Waves in Indie Music Circuit

By Jordan Goodman

Arc Stages in Pleasantville opened its doors to welcome a brand-new alternative band that has its roots in Pleasantville.

The singer-songwriter duo comprised of Aaron David Gleason and Emma Freeman made their performance debut as Pleasantville, where the electrifying indie project premiered songs from their upcoming debut album, “These Embers.”

During their 90-minute set, local music fans were enamored with the duo’s raw, eclectic energy while paying homage to their home community. Their backing band was led by guitarist Brad Lindsey, who Gleason has been performing with for over 15 years, along with other local instrumentalists.

“We’re only showing one element of what we’re doing so far…I think we have a lot of facets to this professional artistic partnership that we haven’t even explored yet,” Gleason said.

Pleasantville started on a whim. Gleason and Freeman initially met a few years ago during an Arc Stages production of “The Fantasticks,” and kept in touch during the ensuing months. Gleason posted an instrumental on his TikTok account as an open invitation for anyone to finish creating the song and to be part of a duet.

Freeman took him up on the opportunity and completed the song on her own. Since then, the songwriting process between them has evolved.

Despite recording “These Embers,” the pair were never in the same location. But their candidness with each other’s contributions has resulted in a generous sharing of material between them and collaboration on their unfinished ideas.

Gleason is the main lyrical mind behind the group, and their ability to work well together has allowed the duo to breathe new life into their ideas. It was a musical direction that Gleason said he could never have taken on his own.

“I remember I sent one song to Emma and what she sent back was surprising, and also not surprising,” Gleason recalled. “She sent back a choir of one-person vocals. I just knew at that point she had to be on every single song.”

They have been able to hone their creative process and ability to showcase their collective post-pandemic emotions and experiences and turn them into art. In his 17-year career, Gleason has shifted genres within the indie-alternative music sphere, working in thoughtful, potent lyrics about his self-image and the world around him, and adding to them with infectious grooves.

His musical journey has taken him down paths he wouldn’t ever have imagined. Before starting Pleasantville, Gleason wrote and performed an original solo show in 2021, “Hell or High Water,” at the 54 Below Lounge in Manhattan, directed by his mother, Tony Award-winner Joanna Gleason. In the performance, Gleason takes his audience down an autobiographical portrait of his life and his evolving mental state in the face of adversity.

He remembers being in a difficult place when planning the production but says “I needed to do that show just to prove to myself that I could do it.”

In one section of the show, Gleason monologues about how a flood nearly cost him his Pleasantville home about three-and-a-half years ago. That traumatic experience placed an abrupt hurdle in front of him, uncertain on what things to focus on and how to move on. The only way he could navigate was to perform the show, taking his life experiences, both good and bad, and casting them into a beacon of light.

“These Embers,” in some way, is a continuation of that with many of the same themes of trauma, stress and trying to making sense of it all.

In an Instagram post on the group’s official account, Gleason speaks about making one of the teaser tracks for the album, “The Universe is Loud,” coming from a place where everything felt loud and uncontrollable. While not trying to make light of the situation, he and Freeman are actively trying to make sense of these occurrences in an honest, cathartic manner, without losing their knack for infectious melodies.

“I would love to be able to be comfortable in a loud universe,” Gleason said. “But will that ever happen? I don’t know. I’ll write a song about it.”

That track along with another single, “Steel Eyed,” came as footnotes for Gleason on navigating this unpredictable playing field the band depicts throughout their music.

“I feel a deep kinship with Emma of knowing that place but also how to transcend it, the experience, you wouldn’t trade it, it happens,” he said. “And here we are. We help others as we help ourselves.”

The music video for “The Universe is Loud” was filmed at the remnants of the historic bowling alley in Pleasantville, off Broadway.

“It was fun to film this video, but it was significant for me, in a way, because when I was younger, I did shows with Arc Stages, and I rehearsed for one of the shows at the bowling alley, so it was kind of cool to go back there and reconnect with my roots,” Freeman said.

Other videos like “Steel Eyed” and “The Treetops” prominently feature well-known Pleasantville locations, including the Westchester Table Tennis Center, St. John’s Church, the Community Garden and Second Mouse Cheese Shop on Manville Road.

The album’s closer, “Chemical Companion,” which they premiered at their debut performance, reflects on a past time when you could live dangerously and be fine. What brings the message of the track home is that they would not trade those experiences.

Gleason has spent his career moving around, from Silver Lake, Calif. to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. But using Pleasantville as this creative entity, embracing the location and everything surrounding it, resonates for Freeman and Gleason.

“I think the name Pleasantville has its own connotations and being a pleasant environment, depending on how you look at it, and I think it just makes an interesting combination with the music that we have, the way its contrasts with the town or doesn’t,” Freeman said.

This novel approach to their creative process came with no set plan. But working together has seen the two making waves within the indie circuit, so far as getting mentioned in Rolling Stone magazine’s “Top Ten Bands to Look Out For” and gaining airplay on WFUV’s New York Slice segment.

The Arc Stages performance last Thursday featured Gleason and Freeman singing side-by-side along with their backing band. It also featured opener Brittain Ashford, known for being in the Broadway cast of “The Great Comet of 1812,” performing with Freeman on backing vocals, and New York City-based music director and pianist Darnell White, who got Gleason his 54 Below gig.

The band played six originals, including three unreleased songs, and ended with a cover of the Traveling Wilburys’ “End of the Line” featuring all of the night’s performers.

With their debut album slated for official release next spring, Gleason and Freeman are looking forward to the future and want to keep their musical partnership going.

“If I’m able to make albums and perform live with Emma, for however long that goes, I think the sky’s the limit in terms of what we can do,” Gleason said. “We’re already grateful for what we have done and it’s already exceeded our expectations.”