A Pioneer of Electronic Music Reanimates Old Songs
Sometime in the mid-two-thousands, when people would still hand you cassette tapes or CDs at shows or in record stores or during hangouts in someone’s parents’ basement or smoke-filled apartment, I was passed a dubbed copy of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s 1986 album“Keyboard Fantasies.” It was a blank cassette in a clear case with the words “KEYBOARD FANTASY” scrawled across the front, the slight misspelling seemingly due to the fact that whoever wrote it ran out of space.
“Keyboard Fantasies” was a self-released project, made with only two instruments—a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a Roland TR-707 drum machine—but it sounded expansive: stabs of synth blending with high-pitched drones of flute, winding and bending electronic notes. Copeland was inspired by sounds from the natural surroundings near his home at the time, in Huntsville, Ontario—rushing water, wind cutting through trees. His father was a pianist, and Copeland, now eighty-two, trained as a classical vocalist from the age of fifteen. (In 1961, he became one of the first Black students to attend McGill University’s music program.) A standout song on the album, “Let Us Dance,” showcased Copeland’s singular voice, which ranged from swellingly operatic to deeply serene. I remember feeling stunned that a single person could hold within him that choir of sounds. The album did not have a wide audience at the time of its release; only a handful of tapes were put out and sold. But, thanks in large part to a Japanese collector, Ryota Masuko, who proselytized in the twenty-tens, Copeland built an underground reputation as an overlooked pioneer of the electronic/synth genre.
Before “Keyboard Fantasies,” Copeland had released two folk albums, but his main work was as a songwriter and performer on the Canadian children’s show “Mr. Dressup.” In a clip from around the same time that “Keyboard Fantasies” was released, Copeland, playing the head of a trading post in Mr. Dressup’s neighborhood, fishes out a birdlike puppet and sings it a song. It’s fascinating to think of him inhabiting two worlds simultaneously—performing songs for children and, in his spare hours, making complex and adventurous ambient music—but the two modes would each end up shaping Copeland’s quietly influential career. Since the nineteen-nineties, Copeland’s primary musical collaborator has been his life partner, Elizabeth, a writer and a performing artist. In recent decades, they have only sporadically released new music—“The Ones Ahead,” from 2023, was the first Copeland album issued under his own name after coming out as a trans man, in 2002. Now, on February 6th, the Copelands are releasing their latest album, “Laughter in Summer,” which comprises voice-and-piano reimaginings of past songs, many of them accompanied by choral arrangements.
The project evolved out of an informal recording session. In the summer of 2025, the Copelands were offered two free days in a studio in Montreal, and they hired a choir to sing with them. In a recent video call, Elizabeth told me, “It was just, let’s put this stuff down so we have it to listen to.” They sang a new version of “Let Us Dance” with the choir, then mixed another recording from the choir’s warmups; the two versions both appear on the album, as “Let Us Dance (Movement One)” and “Let Us Dance (Movement Two),” the opener and closer, respectively. The two takes sound similar, but they both differ mightily from the original, which was accompanied by synthesizers layered atop the note of wind chimes rhythmically clattering, and keyboard effects that mimicked the tone of short horn bursts. Copeland’s voice sounds as rich and flexible as it did back then. Elizabeth told me that the songs serve as a reminder to young musicians about the virtues of live, unadulterated recordings. “So many of them rely on the tricks in the studio–put a little Auto-Tune here, a little A.I. there, let’s add, subtract, multiply, and divide,” she said. “There’s not a lot of artists these days who can go in and do something live off the floor one time. The album is what you heard. If you were standing in the room that day, that’s what you would’ve heard.”
During our call, the couple sat, shoulder to shoulder, in a teal room in their home in Hamilton, Ontario, backdropped by books and records. Elizabeth did most of the talking. In September of 2024, Copeland revealed that he’d been diagnosed with dementia, and that they’d been managing the disease privately for some time. “Laughter in Summer” is the first album since the revelation, but it would be a moving project even without the reality of the illness’s mounting toll. There is a sense of wonder on the new recordings, a search for the depths of a single piece, or a single place, or a single emotional curiosity. The songs find an artist picking through his established works and seeing which parts of them might be illuminated anew. It’s moving, too, because there is no evading the humanness of this record—the collision of actual human voices working in tandem. Elizabeth told me, “To practice any craft, you have to be able to listen and hear the world—hear something other than yourself.”
“Children’s Anthem,” one of the first creative collaborations between Elizabeth and Beverly as a couple, written in 2007 for an anti-bullying conference, is revived on “Laughter in Summer” as a sparse piano-and-voice duet. Toward the end of the track, when Beverly and Elizabeth’s voices blend together, the singing begins to feel spiritual, more like a prayer for an aching world than an ode to those who must endure it. “Harbour,” originally from “The Ones Ahead,” features Elizabeth singing a love song that Beverly wrote to her, providing the breathtaking experience of hearing the “you” in the lyrics become a two-way mirror: “Don’t you know that you’re the deep / Where water, earth and fire meet?” This is not the transformation typical of a cover song or a rerecording. It is a confirmation of reciprocal attention and admiration. The choral elements on the record shine most vividly on the title track, which features polyphonic swells of voices humming melodies, overtaking the piano, dropping and then rising again.
There is a simplicity to a song like “Children’s Anthem” that comes, undoubtedly, from Copeland’s years of making music for children, who need to be able to hear and understand and, hopefully, sing along. I told the couple that I was hesitant to use the word “simple,” because it sounded almost derogatory. “Well, it’s not simple in an inane kind of way,” Elizabeth said. “It’s simple because it has to make a lot of space. It has to make a lot of space for much of life’s joys and sorrows. We make our songs the way we do because we want to leave room for clarity of generosity, of warmth. Because we are at a critical juncture. There are things to be terrified of. But our power is about awakening something beyond fear and cynicism in the human nervous system. Our songs attempt to remind people that simplicity, and innocence, is a kind of power.” Beverly, a longtime practicing Buddhist, told me that he doesn’t really consider himself to be the creator of his music. “I feel that the songs are sent from a higher source. And when they arrive you can say yes or no to them. The good news is that, so far, I have said yes.” Elizabeth replied that she’s never seen him say no, and Beverley smiled, then said, “No, I suppose I haven’t. But there may be a time when I no longer have the facilities to say yes.”
Copeland’s story is one of late-career adoration, but his trajectory also suggests the limitations of being a so-called cult figure. He is a Black trans elder who has built a legacy as an unsung hero of the music world; the problem is that being a symbol of wisdom or endurance doesn’t always translate to material success. In early 2020, capitalizing on the new excitement for Copeland’s music, the couple was set to take off on a world tour. Then the pandemic hit, and all of the shows were cancelled. The Copelands had sold their house not long before, with the idea that they would return from the road and settle into a new one. Now, suddenly, they had no money coming in to cover a mortgage. Beverly’s daughter, Faith, started a GoFundMe for the couple, which raised nearly a hundred thousand dollars, allowing them to buy a small, temporary home in Nova Scotia. Online today, you can find a sealed pressing of “Keyboard Fantasies” selling for more than seventeen hundred dollars. Beverly told me, jokingly, “If I were to die, they would be worth way more. Sometimes I want to fake that I’m dead.”
He and Elizabeth brought up Jackie Shane, another Black trans American artist who lived in Canada. Shane recorded a run of singles and a stunning live album on Caravan Records, in 1967, but had retired from music by the early nineteen-seventies, spending time taking care of her ailing mother and stepfather in Nashville. For years, the few people who knew of her work were unsure whether or not Shane was still alive. Beginning near the end of her life, in 2019, there was renewed interest in her music. Old albums were unearthed, bootlegged, and reissued. A documentary film, “Any Other Way,” was released in 2024. This process of rediscovery was both wonderful for the public and heartbreaking for Shane, who might have had a different life and career if she had been appreciated in her time.
Perhaps Copeland’s career was simply a series of misalignments. He was once ahead of his time, and then the world caught up, but when the world did finally catch up he could not reap the long-awaited fruits of his brilliance. Part of the beauty of an album such as “Laughter in Summer” is that it might, once again, inspire an audience to seek out the original recordings of Copeland’s songs. Elizabeth spoke of the years when Beverly was writing music prolifically with little recognition.“If he had been willing to put on a skirt and wear some lipstick, maybe his music would’ve gotten out there more, or if he’d been willing to write more to genre.” She went on, “We’ve both been focussed more on what the meaning of our work is rather than who is or is not paying attention. And the cost of it, at this point in our life, in our elder years, is that we’re just kind of hanging on.” She added, “Glenn has given a lot. I have given a lot. Maybe I haven’t had quite the fame and fortune, but—”
Beverly interjected. “But it’s coming,” he said. ♦