As a child, when I learned about capital-H History, I pictured it as a kind of basalt cliff: unmovable, unshakeable, a monument I could look up at and wonder how it formed. (I had been reading too many fantasy novels at the time.) But as I grew older I learned more and more about what hadn’t been taught, and then more and more about what had only recently been discovered, or, more fascinating still, rediscovered. I loved the idea that things that had been lost could someday be found and properly appreciated. Things that were buried could be discovered; things once outside time could find their way back to us. 

I was thinking about all this some months ago in Reykjavik, after a long afternoon walking under some of those basalt rock faces I’d previously only imagined. I was at a whiskey bar trying to explain the importance of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s music to a stranger. I said something like, It’s new age-y, and it’s influenced just about everyone. Which is true enough: if you don’t listen very closely to his songs “Nothing Beautiful” or “Good Morning Blues,” if you don’t take the time to swish the music around on your tongue, they can sound superficially similar to Seventies folk schlock—moody acoustic guitar, soft vocals, abstract lyrics. 

But if you do take the time to really listen, you’ll find arrangements that veer away from the expected; by the end you might wonder why jazz trumpet didn’t feature more prominently in more folk records. “Nothing Beautiful” stands on Glenn-Copeland’s operatic tenor, front and center, never overshadowed by anything; the percussion is sparse, just a wood block tapping while a mournful trumpet floats in the background. “Good Morning Blues” works the same way: on a second, third, or sixteenth listen, the music deepens perceptibly; you start to notice how insistently, for example, the song is propelled forward by its varying time signatures. Glenn-Copeland is a marvel who was almost lost to the sweep of history. 

He grew up Quaker in Philadelphia in the Forties and Fifties. In his early teens his family moved to Greenbelt Knoll, one of the first integrated housing developments in America, nineteen houses on a cul de sac in the middle of Pennypack Park, in the city’s northeast. In an interview from 1979 Glenn-Copeland recalled that his father, a school principal, was obsessed with classical music, playing piano three or four hours a day—Bach, Chopin, Mozart. His mother had been the first black woman to graduate from Penn State, deciding to do “all kinds of stuff people didn’t make decisions about in those days especially if they were Black.” She sang him spirituals. 

But he had his own records too. Glenn-Copeland’s taste in music was eclectic: he’d go to parties and listen to songs from the Harlem Hit Parade (a Billboard chart dedicated to music popular in Harlem) as well as African drumming, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Odetta. In 1961 he traded Philly for Montreal and McGill University, where he studied voice and oboe as one of the school’s first black students. Back then, before his transition, he identified as a lesbian woman; he was ostracized for being openly gay and eventually dropped out. His parents took him to electroshock therapy—the standard “treatment” at the time—but he escaped before undergoing it. It wasn’t until 1995 that he found the language to describe himself as transgender, though in interviews he has said he told his mother that he was a boy when he was three years old. 

In 1965, after escaping the hospital and quitting Canada, Glenn-Copeland returned to the US for a year and a half to study opera and German lieder with the famed soprano Eleanor Steber, until one day he woke up and thought, as he recalled in a 1979 interview, “Oh, that’s enough!” From then on, he decided, he would write and sing his own songs. 

There was an early band in Montreal, a first recurring gig with Terry and McGhee that paid a generous $50 a week, some recordings of classical music in the mid-1960s, two back-to-back folk albums in the early 1970s that didn’t make a huge splash, and a score for the 1974 underground queer movie Montreal Main. In 1980 he set up his own label to release a four-song EP called At Last!; it was on that same label that, six years later, he put out an electronic record called Keyboard Fantasies. Mainstream recognition for his music eluded him, however. His more visible, high-profile work was done elsewhere. In the late 1970s he had joined the cast of Mr. Dressup, a Canadian children’s show, where he became a regular actor and musician for a quarter century, and he was for a time a writer on Sesame Street.  

Glenn-Copeland’s story might have ended there: a beloved actor and writer who had an outsized impact on Canadian children between the Seventies and Nineties. But in 2015 a Japanese record collector rediscovered the tape to Keyboard Fantasies, bought every unsold copy, and resold them to people around the world. It was a revelation. Word spread like a Canadian wildfire: the next year the album was reissued by a Toronto record label. From there Keyboard Fantasies rocked the music world; now critics and listeners rightly consider it a masterpiece. 

There’s an anecdote that Glenn-Copeland has shared with a few interviewers: when he was young a fortune teller told him he wouldn’t be successful until he was very old. He was seventy-one the year Keyboard Fantasies was rediscovered and made him into a world-touring musician. Perhaps that mystic had seen something in him for which we didn’t yet have the words, something for which the world would have to wait. But I don’t think it’s wise to put too much stock in what a person behind a crystal ball says, if only because imagining what-ifs can easily distract you from the business of living. The present is all we really have, and it is an astonishing, impossible gift. And that’s Glenn-Copeland’s great subject—the beautiful improbability that we are all here together. Finding his music again feels right because it’s a connection we sorely needed and nearly missed. 

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Glenn-Copeland’s music is about as eclectic as his career, managing to fuse together all of the traditions he loves: European romantic melodies, African drumming, jazz, folk, and of course a healthy dose of synthesizers. He has also maintained a serious, decades-long Buddhist practice, which has undoubtedly had an influence on his sound—he has called finding Buddhism “the single most important thing in my life.” (The joy it brings him extends outward to his personality; interviewers appear as immediately charmed by the man as they are by the music, with at least one extolling the virtues of “Glennergy.”)

At first listen his debut album, the self-titled Beverly Copeland (1970), seems strange: a new flavor, something that goes down easy and leaves you wanting more. There’s the voice—muscular and honeyed, velvet and iron. You could make furniture out of it. And the style: operatic, hinting at Copeland’s lieder past, fleshed out with a heady mixture of jazz and Seventies folk. The songs aren’t psychedelic per se, but the lyrics feel like they float at high altitude, breaths of rarefied air. “Interval” includes a characteristically Glenn-Copeland koan that swerves hard between the spiritual and physical realms, set to a haunting plucked guitar line: 

There is no voyage 
That will not lead
Into the eye of the storm
One eye
The circle is all the same
One dream
And in between
You get off
Ornament and Mission
For a glass of water

Broadly the songs on Beverly Copeland are about love, and lovers; as he confirmed in an interview decades later, they were written to and for women he was hoping to romance. “And at that time I couldn’t say ‘she,’ so it was veiled,” he said to another interviewer. “But it’s all there.” On “Good Morning Blues,” we hear a lover’s conflicted thoughts as they lie beside their beloved, accompanied by a strummed acoustic guitar and a soulfully muted trumpet: 

Good morning love
Can I fit your skin?
Good morning love
No, I’m not what I seem
Take morning love
Don’t nail yourself to a dream
And I’ve knelt down before

On that album, Copeland’s sensibility already feels fully formed, beamed in from somewhere else. His voice is unmistakable, but so are his melodies and compositions, the way he layers sound like laminated dough, until it puffs into an airy, buttery whole. In fact Copeland has, over the years, talked about his process as a kind of extraterrestrial transmission. He calls it the Universal Broadcasting System: the world transmits ideas to him, and he faithfully transcribes them.

Another set of transmissions was beamed over from the UBS to Copeland that same year—his next album, Beverly Glenn-Copeland. The opportunity came about because a producer, Doug Riley, heard him performing in Toronto and suggested they make a record together. Riley assembled a band and then gathered them in a studio. Glenn-Copeland played his songs once, and then they recorded the entire album in a single take. No edits, no takebacks, no second-guessing. In an interview years later, Glenn-Copeland called it a stunning experience: “I mean, I was like a little kid from lollipop land, landing in the midst of, you know, French cuisine.”  

Even though Beverly Glenn-Copeland was recorded the same year as Beverly Copeland, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it came out years later; while it shares an eclectic musical sensibility with its predecessor, it feels like the product of an evolutionary leap. As with most of his music, there’s some opera, some new age, some folk; you can hear all of these ingredients in the instrumentation, the arrangements, and the lyrics. But the other people in the room were expert jazz musicians, so the instrumentation—electric guitar, brushed snares, flutes, strings—feels like it’s largely out of that tradition, and much more accomplished than on the previous record. The genre-bending seems more intentional, more sophisticated; the folksy vocals swirl into the jazzy compositions, as in “Song from Beads,” where we hear flourishes from the keys and the guitar while Glenn-Copeland sings about miles and rain. 

The lyrics have also grown more direct, the love and loss a little more obvious. Still, they feel almost as beamed-in as the music, swinging between high and low, between the material and the immaterial. “And now, naked here, I wait for you/My flesh a naked window here waits for you/Because, my love, you are not here,” he sings on “Ghost House,” capturing the moments after a loss with startling precision. 

Both records were released to a fairly muted response, likely because the music just didn’t sound like anything else out there. They weren’t unparseable; you just had to take them on their own terms. Glenn-Copeland was in his mid-twenties, and he decided to retreat to the Ontario wilderness. He landed the role on Mr. Dressup after one of its writers asked to write him into a script as a musician—and then asked him to write a song tailored to the script. Even so, it was sixteen years before he released his next full album, Keyboard Fantasies. At the time it faced the same problem his other albums had—it sounded like it was recorded in a future that hadn’t yet come to pass. He made two hundred copies of the tape, and then he stopped releasing music under his own name. 

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Glenn-Copeland made Keyboard Fantasies with an Atari, a Yamaha DX7 synth, and a Roland drum machine. The new technology meant that he could do everything himself; he could transcribe exactly what the Universal Broadcasting System was sending him without needing to translate it first. There’s a purity to the music that’s undeniable, so very clearly the product of one man’s vision and ability. The first track, “Ever New,” sounds like a hymn and works like a devotional. That beautiful contralto voice—now mellowed a bit with age—and those rhythmic synths form a meditation on the changing of the seasons, the renewal and life that spring and summer bring. And it is an explicit invitation to us, Glenn-Copeland’s listeners, to see the world the way he sees it. “Welcome the spring, the summer rain,” he sings,

Softly turned to sing again
Welcome the bud, the summer blooming flower 
Welcome the child whose hand I hold 
Welcome to you both young and old 
We are ever new, we are ever new.

The other tracks on the album are no less numinous. “Winter Astral” is an icy instrumental exploration that’s nonetheless melodically comforting; “Let Us Dance” is a joyful paean to the morning, to movement, scaffolded by an electronic drum kit beat and what sounds like a digital glockenspiel; with its cheery, muted bass line, “Sunset Village” tells you to let it go, that it’ll all be okay. Though it’s clearly of a piece with Beverly Copeland and Beverly Glenn-Copeland—that voice! those layered arrangements!—it feels spiritually grander. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Glenn-Copeland had started his Buddhist practice in the early Seventies, after he’d recorded his first two albums.

Keyboard Fantasies is full of simple, catchy melodies, supported by gently arpeggiated synth rhythms, soft as cashmere; by the end you come to believe the circuits can feel body heat. The sonic landscape is meadowlike, delicate as dandelion seeds. There are moments when it feels like taking a morning walk in the deep woods, filling your lungs with pine-scented air. You remember that you are as much a part of the natural world as anything else on the planet; that you and everything else happen to share this brief conscious time together. You notice how improbable this life is, when you think about it on a cosmic scale. It might be the warmest electronic music has ever sounded.

Keyboard Fantasies’s otherworldly qualities have inspired a generation of musicians. A documentary, Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story, came out in 2019; in 2021, in collaboration with Glenn-Copeland, the Guggenheim Museum commissioned the artist Wu Tsang to create a site-specific film installation that revolved around Glenn-Copeland’s singing. His fans include everyone from Robyn to Four Tet to Devendra Banhart. In 2021 his label put out Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined, featuring reworkings of each track on the album by artists including Arca, Blood Orange, and Bon Iver. 

Since the reissue of Keyboard Fantasies, Glenn-Copeland has put out a live album, a compilation album, a reissue of his 2004 trip-hop-inflected album Primal Prayer (originally released under the pseudonym Phynix), and, in 2023, The Ones Ahead. His final solo album, it sounds percussive, like a series of manifestos—fifty years of a constantly evolving artistic vision, anchored by that singular voice. It’s perhaps the most explicit articulation yet of the ethical and philosophical commitments that have always guided Glenn-Copeland’s music.

More than anything it’s a meditation on life and living, about what it requires of us and what we owe one another. In anyone else’s hands that subject might feel ponderous and more than a bit morbid. And on the page Glenn-Copeland’s lyrics can indeed feel a bit obvious. “Shelter fleeing children, the homeless, starving,” he sings on “Stand Anthem.” “Bring their brothers back from the killing fields/Sweep the air clean of this dirty material/Let the polar bear have back his own ice shields.” Behind it are insistent toms, a nice bass kick, and powerful piano chords; it’s music that you might hear at the end of a particularly uplifting documentary. Yet the forthrightness of Glenn-Copeland’s sentiments, his clear vision of the world that could be, feels good; it’s very clearly the product of a lifetime of moral thinking, wisdom come by honestly.

The Ones Ahead is a repudiation of the way things are, but it also affirms that Glenn-Copeland is an optimist—the thing you have to be to create a better world for yourself and those who come after. “Each of us to others is connected,” he sings on the title track. “If one of us is lost, we’re all affected. How will you live? What will you give today?” Glenn-Copeland’s life is a testament to the fact that he has always been serious about the future. How else could he work with children for so long? And of course the only way to care about the future is to act in our very flawed present. The Ones Ahead is firmly committed to the here and now, rooted in this particular moment. 

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At eighty-two Glenn-Copeland is still accepting transmissions from the UBS: releasing singles, covers, and pilots for children’s shows, not to mention touring. In February he and his wife, Elizabeth Copeland, released Laughter in Summer, a new album that includes reinterpretations of some of his most famous songs—among them “Ever New” and “Let Us Dance”—as well as new, one-take recordings from further back in his catalog. It is a record of the songs they had been singing on tour together, and as a result it feels lived-in. The fact that we finally hear Elizabeth, who’s been an invisible influence in his albums for decades, gives it a strange power. 

It is also a spare album, recorded mostly in one take and centered largely on Glenn-Copeland’s voice, though here and there he is accompanied by a choir or a few instruments: a piano, a clarinet, whistles. Every extraneous thing has been jettisoned, and the songs bloom into fullness. “Laughter in Summer” is a lush duet with his wife; in their voices—Beverly vocalizing a melody without words, Elizabeth weaving hers with lyrics—you can hear their marriage. On “Shenandoah,” Glenn-Copeland’s take on the traditional American folk song, the instruments drop away and you’re enveloped in a cocoon of human voices; it is a masterful performance, poised and expertly controlled. “Children’s Anthem,” with its calm piano and hymnal structure, feels like it was conceived in a church. By bringing together moments from across Glenn-Copeland’s career, Laughter in Summer becomes perhaps his most direct meditation on time and its passing.

Geologic time, on the other hand, doesn’t respect human time. All of our dramas—our births, flowerings, and deaths—happen in a flash. But there is something in those silent millennia that calls nevertheless. “I didn’t grow up around great cliffs of rock. All I know is that when I saw great cliffs I went, ‘Oh, this is home,’” Glenn-Copeland once remarked in an interview, “to stand on rocks billions of years old and to realize that as the earth was forming, that was one of the first things that she came up with.” 

In 2024 Glenn-Copeland revealed that he had been diagnosed with dementia. It makes the present we share with him even more precious; it underscores just how fortunate we were to find him when we did. “Let it go, let it go down/It’s okay/Let it come, let it take all/Thoughts away,” he sings on “Sunset Village,” the last track of Keyboard Fantasies. Whether or not this is the last tour or the last album, his music won’t be lost again. One of his early compositions, recorded on Beverly Copeland, is called “Untitled (Make the Answer ‘Yes’).” Accompanied by a hypnotic fingerpicked guitar line, his voice bittersweetness itself, he sings: “I have soared with the evening/I paid with my song/For its coming and leaving/So it bore me along.”