Laughter In Summer Beverly Glenn-Copeland

• 1 Let Us Dance (Movement One) 04:19
• 2 Ever New (At Hotel2Tango) 04:01
• 3 Laughter In Summer 05:06
• 4 Children's Anthem 03:35
• 5 Harbour (At Hotel2Tango) 04:32
• 6 Middle Island Lament 03:51
• 7 Shenandoah 02:33
• 8 Prince Caspian's Dream (At Hotel2Tango) 04:03
• 9 Let Us Dance (Movement Two) 04:51
• Total Runtime 36:51

Info for Laughter In Summer

From the moment we are born, we begin the long walk home. Elizabeth and Beverly and Glenn-Copeland started down the path together nearly half a century ago, and have been trailing it since, hand in hand and song by song. Together, they’ve made a life sharing their unselfish hearts—ones too large for earthly configuration—through art and community, encouraging us all to take our own dance down the road with elemental love and grace.

Now, as Glenn lives with a version of Dementia known as LATE, their walk has taken on a different weight. Out of this season comes Laughter In Summer, an album the couple made together—realizing, before long, that it was a love letter to one another: a tender ledger of memories, shared devotion, grief and joy. We, as listeners, are privileged to enter the orbit of the Glenn-Copelands’ love. It is a generative force: a spine-builder, a river, a source of nourishment and vital life. Spending any time with Laughter In Summer can rouse us from slumber, reawakening instincts dulled by atomization and nihilism—and all that this love counters.

Laughter In Summer marks a return to the collaborative spirit that first bound Elizabeth and Glenn together all those decades ago. “I think the universe was conspiring to get us together for a long time,” Elizabeth says now. She was nineteen when she first saw him—Toronto, Jarvis Street, in a small restaurant. Onstage stood a figure with an enigmatic presence, dressed in a sweatsuit, playing piano and singing as though for no one but himself. For Elizabeth, nothing existed but the sound of that voice: plum-rich, tender, and assured.

After that night, she did not see or hear of Glenn again for a decade. She was pregnant with her daughter, Faith when a friend stopped her on the street and entreated, “Elizabeth, have you heard of Beverly Glenn-Copeland?!” She hadn’t. Into her hands the friend pressed one of Glenn’s homemade cassettes. On it were two songs: ‘Sailing On the Winds of Time’ and ‘Hold On’. Elizabeth played the latter for her unborn child, singing along as she carried Faith inside.

When Elizabeth had saved enough to record her own album in the nineties, ‘My Mother’s Eyes”, she longed to cover ‘Hold On’. She reached out to Glenn personally for his permission, and in that exchange, their friendship began. Theirs soon grew into a partnership rooted in music and spirituality. Elizabeth invited Glenn into the theater shows she produced, sometimes as collaborator, sometimes as co-producer. They shared stages, work, and vision. The seeds of Laughter In Summer—of creating music as a shared lifeline—were planted here, long before the album itself would exist.

Their love story truly began in the spring of 2007. Elizabeth, a single mother, sent a ferocious prayer to the universe: Please send me my mate. That same night she dreamt of Glenn, standing on a hill, moonlight behind him. She woke and called their mutual friend Maggie Hollis—who sang on Glenn’s ‘La Vita’—and told her of the dream. Maggie said Glenn was going through a divorce, and let her know, “Elizabeth, you would be perfect for him.”

Later that spring, Elizabeth attended Maggie’s wedding, knowing Glenn would be there. Afterward she called him. He was eating oatmeal with his oversized spoon, as he often did. Elizabeth told him about her dream: how he was reaching for her, gilded by the moonlight. On the other end of the line, she heard the spoon fall to the floor. Glenn would later say that it was his mother, who had recently passed, who brought Elizabeth to him. By the end that summer2007, they were in love Their romance only emboldened their shared vocation: to make art in service of community, especially for children, so that the next generation might carry their message forward. In 2010, they left Toronto for the East Coast, drawn by lower costs and the call of the ocean and forests. There they founded KPH Theater Productions, a children’s theater school that flourished until 2016, when the local economy collapsed. Closing it was a difficult dream for the couple to relinquish. For years it had given them a grounded way to bring people together, to show how the arts could be a tool for belonging.

For too long, the story of Beverly Glenn-Copeland has overlooked the importance of local theater in his work, and, more fundamentally it has overlooked Elizabeth. The narrative built around Glenn has unwittingly echoed misogynistic forms of lionization, where the woman’s influence is diminished in favor of a sole male genius. But what of the woman who produced the shows that gave Glenn stages to stand on, arranged his music, raised children, built theater programs for other people’s children, paid the bills, carried him through the hardships of obscurity and the disorientation of belated fame? What of the woman who now, as Glenn lives with cognitive impairment, walks him home? “Behind every great man, a woman,” the saying goes. Glenn is keen to correct it: “In front of every great woman, a man.”

Now, Elizabeth has rightly taken her place as producer of Glenn’s work, shaping Laughter In Summer alongside their music director, Alex Samaras. The album’s title comes from a song born almost accidentally. Glenn, as his cognitive impairment advanced, began composing a series of instrumentals he called Songs With No Words, meant for listeners to write their own lyrics. One day he played one such piece for Elizabeth. Sitting by a lake, listening to loons and gazing at the sky, words rose up in her: laughter in summer, how I remember. “It was a very painful time,” she recalls, “because I was so aware of just how much of my sweetheart I was losing.” My life, my joy, on Earth, here, with you, she sang. The words came as a gift, as if from the loons themselves.

In 2023, before a Montreal performance, they were invited to spend a few days recording alongside producer and engineer Howard Bilerman (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Vic Chesnutt, and Wolf Parade) at Hotel2Tango. There was no plan to make a record. They simply wanted to capture the songs they had been singing on tour, joined by a choir of Canadian voices gathered by Alex. None of the singers had rehearsed with Glenn and Elizabeth. The first take of the first song, ‘Let Us Dance: Movement Two’, became the version on the album. Every other track you hear was recorded in a single take.

Other songs on the album reach further back. ‘Children’s Anthem’ dates from the couple’s early years together, written for a teachers’ workshop on bullying. Elsewhere, writing on their own ancestral lines, ‘Middle Island Lament’ recalls their years running the theater school on the Acadian coast, rooted in local history of famine, quarantine, and farewell. ‘Harbor’, written for Elizabeth’s birthday, reappears too, a song Glenn relearned by improvisation after memory loss, backstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with Elizabeth’s hand in his.

As Glenn’s executive functioning diminishes, his musical being—“and I would say his heart self,” Elizabeth adds—only grows stronger. This, she believes, is the dividend of fifty years of Buddhist practice. But their love has been braided with grief. “One of the things both Glenn and I have contended with in this walk, walking him home, is the depth of our love for each other, and how it’s reflected in the depth of grief that we feel. As much as I’m losing parts of him, he’s said to me, ‘Honey, I’m also losing parts of you, because I can’t remember certain things anymore,’ and it breaks my heart.”

They refuse to look away from the sorrow. At least once a week, they sit together and name what is being lost. “Because when you deny an emotion,” Elizabeth says, “it becomes frozen within you.” The making of Laughter In Summer became another way of being present with each other—songs not just as compositions but as testaments.

“From the moment we are born, we are walking towards our deaths,” Elizabeth says. “And that’s okay. In order for there to be birth, there must be death.” Glenn tells her that when he goes, he will be able to be with her even more than now. For Elizabeth, the thought is both comfort and pain. But what sustains them both is Glenn’s refusal to stop giving. “Sometimes he’ll hold my hands and say, ‘I have so much more to give. I’ve got so much to give these young people.’”

As his wife and his caretaker, Elizabeth wants the world to show him its love for Glenn. She wants him to see how the world sees him; how it loves him, how it needs him.

And so, they keep walking. Let us join them, and dance down that road.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland, vocals
Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland, vocals
Alex Samaras, vocals, piano
Naomi McCarroll-Butler, clarinet, whistles
The Choir:
Helena Deland, vocals
Camille Deléan, vocals
Eugénie Jobin, vocals
Robin Love, vocals
Naomi McCarroll-Butler, vocals
Mara Nesrallah, vocals
Frédérique Roy, vocals
Alanna Stuart, vocals
Adèle Trottier-Rivard, vocals

Beverly Glenn-Copeland
In the tumult of this world, there are constants. People need each other. Every motion brushes against others, moving. None of us are siloed and none of us are still. The music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland drinks deeply from these truths. For decades, the Philadelphia-born, Canada-based singer, songwriter, and composer has drawn myriad musical practices toward a single, luminous conviction: that music can shake us loose from what closes us off from each other. His multifaceted body of work surrenders to the beauty, pain, and great capacity for healing that courses through life; in its unguarded sincerity, it invites you to share in its courage. Glenn-Copeland’s new album, The Ones Ahead — his first collection of new music in nearly two decades — deepens these explorations, casting searching light into how all of us must dissolve the harms of this world and carry each other forward into the next.

Glenn-Copeland began his musical career in the 1960s, when he studied classical singing at Montreal’s McGill University and performed at Expo 67. A pair of self-titled, multi-genre albums released in the early ’70s showcased his powerful voice and songwriting talent. In 1986, while living in rural Ontario, Glenn-Copeland taught himself to use digital synthesis and recorded the album that would ultimately alter the entire course of his career. At the time, he self-released Keyboard Fantasies via a 200-copy cassette run, selling just a handful while the rest waited in storage. In 2015, a Japanese record collector emailed Glenn-Copeland about selling the remainder; a new generation had unearthed his art. The music spread globally, and a few years later, in his 70s, Glenn-Copeland embarked on his first European tour to share his songs with live audiences, a journey captured in Posy Dixon’s 2019 documentary Keyboard Fantasies.

Since Keyboard Fantasies’ rediscovery, a new generation of listeners and artists have embraced Glenn-Copeland’s music. In 2021, he released the remix album Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined, which featured reimagined versions of the album’s songs from contemporary visionaries such as Arca, Blood Orange, and Kelsey Lu. As his work has spread its inspiration, Glenn-Copeland has continued to develop his own prismatic musical practice. The songs on The Ones Ahead draw from a wealth of traditions, from American jazz to Irish fiddle songs to West African percussion. Some, like “No Other” and “Stand Anthem,” were originally born as parts of song cycles and stage plays. Glenn-Copeland writes with an ear to what he calls the Universal Broadcasting System, receiving transmissions from the vibrations of the world around him and faithfully transcribing them. “The UBS sends what it wants, and like a good servant, I listen and write what I am given,” he says. Many of these songs came to him in the mid-2010s, around the time his music began to reach its intergenerational and intercontinental audience.

Glenn-Copeland recorded The Ones Ahead in collaboration with producer John Herbermann and Indigo Rising, the band who accompanied him on his inaugural European tour, whose playing lends a cinematic richness to these intricately textured electroacoustic arrangements. After watching a live performance from Glenn-Copeland and Indigo Rising, Herbermann chose to record the album live from the floor, capturing the dynamic interplay among the group. The bond the musicians share and their deep trust in one another shine through these songs. Kurt Inder’s elegiac slide guitar glows against Nick Dourado’s delicate piano on “Love Takes All,” while on “Harbour (Song for Elizabeth),” Glenn-Copeland trades verses with singer Jeremy Costello, who echoes the love ballad’s lyrics with warm affection over drummer Bianca Palmer’s softly brushed cymbals.

The spirited, polyrhythmic “Africa Calling” opens The Ones Ahead, a song without lyrics that honors Glenn-Copeland’s West African heritage. “In the ’80s, I had the honor of performing with an incredible artist named Dido, a master of the drums indigenous to West Africa,” Glenn-Copeland notes. “The beauty of this drumming tradition is explored in ‘Africa Calling’. Over the years, in many conversations, I have come to understand that I share an undefinable, unnamed feeling — a calling — with many other members of the African diaspora, a bone-deep need to explore and express our heritage. Alongside the grief, there is a longing to know our roots, hidden from us as family lines were torn apart in the terrible days of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In a world still caught in the ties of colonialism, I know I am not alone in needing to heed the call of this generations-old longing.”

The Ones Ahead weaves together poignant themes: the need for love and mutual care in the face of destruction and uncertainty, the power people have when they reach out for each other, the ways that the wisdom of past generations can guide us along the path forward. On “Stand Anthem,” written as part of a collaboration with his wife and longtime creative partner Elizabeth for an eco-play called Bearing Witness, Glenn-Copeland calls upon the power of the human collective to right the course of the world toward sustainable survival. At a time when choosing the right thing can feel impossibly complex, “Stand Anthem” clarifies a simple emotional call: “We have only one action / We have only one heart / Stand!” Glenn-Copeland urges with his Indigo Rising bandmates. Tune into what’s around you, and the right thing rises to the surface. The album’s title track bridges the music’s deep historical roots and the vast future to which it gestures. “The title of this song refers to two things: the generations to come and those in the unseen world that guide us: our ancestors, our spiritual guides. Whether or not we believe in them, they are there for us every minute of every day. All they need is for us to ask for their help,” Glenn-Copeland says. “As the old world crumbles, a new world is waiting to be born. All of our various strengths are needed. The generations of those yet to come are calling us forward.”

From the stirring, rapturous “People of the Loon” to the gorgeously flowing “Prince Caspian’s Dream,” The Ones Ahead cultivates a vibrant hope for this world and what it must become to survive. A new chapter in an expansive and unique body of work, Glenn-Copeland’s latest album offers flowering wisdom for the world to come, needed now more urgently than ever.

This album contains no booklet.