Beverly Glenn-Copeland : Laughter in Summer
Music is often used as a way to preserve our interactions with people, situations, and emotions. At its big, broad heart, however, that really means it keeps track of time—even our engagement with wordless works is a mark of how we choose to spend it. In 2023 The Ones Ahead was a joyous resetting of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s clock, a poetic declaration of newly found power and inspiration he wanted to share, full of horn-like synths, pedal steel guitar, and drums and vocals connected to Africa. This year’s follow-up Laughter in Summer is not a purposefully sad affair, but it’s by design a quieter one.
Between his presence on Red Hot’s recent Transa compilation and multiple musical artists promoting his work on Amoeba Records’ “What’s in My Bag?” YouTube series, the soft, folksy stylings of the Canadian artist have seen a well-deserved uptick in interest. After sporadic releases in the 1970s and 1980s, Glenn-Copeland hit critical mass via reissues of his lo-fi electronica cult classic Keyboard Fantasies and the release of The Ones Ahead, his first LP where he’d publicly identified as a trans man. Laughter in Summer documents his first steps down an entirely new path: living with a form of dementia.
Much of Laughter in Summer was first performed by Glenn-Copeland and his wife Elizabeth on what would be his final tour, and recorded in one take in Montreal under the eye of Godspeed You! Black Emperor producer Howard Bilerman. Piano and voice stand front and center here with the lightest touches of percussion and wind instruments; Elizabeth duets or takes the lead throughout the middle of the LP. The lyricism of songs like the title track and a new version of “Harbour” from The Ones Ahead might seem simple and concise (“And my heart aches/When your tears flow/But then spring breaks/And that’s all I know”) but it carries additional emotional weight knowing it’s being sung not just with but to the partner in the room.
Laughter in Summer traverses modern choral music up to and including narratives meant for the stage—juxtaposing the youthful energy of a Rent with the deep, weary tones of a Porgy and Bess—and ties together singer-songwriter threads like Laura Nyro and Joan Armatrading. These let Beverly Glenn-Copeland lead hymns bound to no church, suggesting that salvation can instead be found in the mystery and discovery of brand new places (“Shenandoah”) and people (“Children’s Anthem,” a revisitation of “Ever New” from Keyboard Fantasies)—music marking time, and helping construct observations based on it. And it bakes a different kind of joy into Laughter in Summer: the pride in having had a good run, an acknowledgment of meaning found in lived experience as the sand starts running out of the hourglass.
Label: Transgressive
Year: 2026
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Beverly Glenn-Copeland : Laughter in Summer
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