Sometimes you hear a song that sounds as if it was made for you — not about you, but rather a musical tool for moving yourself from who you are toward who you are becoming. This is precisely how I felt one night last summer when, from beneath the surface of a hot bath, I first encountered those cool, rustling chords of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s mystical, seven-minute ode to natural rebirth, “Ever New.”
Transition, with all its attendant thrills and worries, was finally on my personal horizon, and here came this oceanic swell of a voice offering a mantra of evolution: “Welcome the bud,” he directed softly. “We are ever new.” From my vantage point, the song figured transness neither as a disorder, nor as a case of being born in the wrong body, but as a truth of life as natural as the turning of the leaves. I nearly leapt out of the tub.
With its serene combination of gentle electronic strumming and meditative lyrics, the track emits the same peace that permeates the artist’s 1986 new age masterpiece Keyboard Fantasies, which is currently enjoying a popular resurgence. Fans who have come to the album in recent days are diving deep into its lore, like that it originally sold only a few dozen cassettes, or that it then spent three decades in utter obscurity before a Japanese record collector’s interest sparked a critical and popular re-examination. If you know those legends, you may have already read about Glenn-Copeland over the past year, or seen one of the two documentaries made about his unexpected rise to stardom. You might have even heard him talk about the prophecy he heard four decades ago — the one which correctly predicted he would only see mainstream success as an artist late in life.
I knew nothing of Glenn-Copeland that moment in the bath. I knew only what I felt, which was a sensation as bizarre as it was unmistakable: the feeling of being loved by someone I had never met, of being known in ways that I didn’t yet know myself.
Over the next eleven months, as I immersed myself in what Posy Dixon, one of Glenn-Copeland’s documentarians, affectionately calls the “Glenniverse,” I learned that my feelings of communion with the artist were hardly unique; that musicians and countless fans around the world have all experienced his gravitational pull. I wondered how so many people could each be compelled so intimately by the work of one musician — especially one who has lived most of his life in isolation. The cellist, singer, and Glenn-Copeland disciple Kelsey Lu has a theory: “Listening to Glenn is like connecting to the Earth itself,” they tell me; he is ever new because his music emerges from that which we all share: the land.
These days, Glenn-Copeland can be found roaming the ancient, jagged coastlines of southeastern Nova Scotia, where he lives with his wife, Elizabeth, and their 18-year-old cat, Mieu Mieu. At 77, the artist, who goes by Glenn, grins easily and laughs with the crinkly eyes of those who’ve seen a thing or two in this life. When we speak via Zoom, he greets me from the studio of his hilltop home, located just a few minutes from the Bay of Fundy. Here, the artist tells me, 160 billion metric tons of water flow in and out everyday. There’s something fitting about the image of Glenn-Copeland standing on a cliff, presiding over the waves. After a lifetime of making music, the world is finally listening. The tide is coming in.
Glenn-Copeland grew up in a Quaker home in Greenbelt Knoll, a wooded suburb just outside Philadelphia and the city’s first planned racially integrated development. His mother sang spirituals to him while he was still in the womb, and his father, an expert pianist, would fill the house with Bach, Chopin, and Mozart. Ever since he was six months old, Glenn-Copeland demonstrated an instinctive connection to music, often humming along to the radio from his crib. That the young artist would grow up to study classical music couldn’t have come as any surprise, but he defied expectations in other, more personal ways.
Glenn-Copeland always knew he was a boy. He told his mother as much by the age of three. Information about transness, however, was scant for those growing up in the 1940s. The idea of deviating from cisgender and heterosexual norms terrified his parents, who believed being as normal as possible was the safest route for a Black kid coming of age in early ‘60s America. Yet their fears did little to stop his blooming queer explorations.
Without language to describe his gender, Glenn-Copeland thought for many years that he was a lesbian. In college, he dated another student from the U.S. studying at McGill. They lived on the same floor. She had dark hair that she liked to style after Jackie Kennedy’s iconic bouffant. While he studied lieder, a German classical tradition, she took science classes. In those days, queer relationships were outlawed in Canada, so the pair had to be discreet about where they went together in public.
“There wasn’t a lot of hanging out in the open to be done,” Glenn-Copeland tells me. “But one of the things we loved to do was go out for Chinese food. That was one of the only spaces we could go as a couple.”
The relationship lasted five years, including several that were imperiled by the combined homophobia of Glenn-Copeland’s family and the university. Once during his studies, his parents ambushed him, forcing him into their car and speeding off to a mental hospital. Had he not narrowly escaped, the young artist would have endured electroshock conversion therapy, he explains in Dixon’s documentary. Back at McGill, school administrators did “everything they could to make it impossible for us to be comfortable in any way, shape, or form,” he tells me. So he dropped out. “She managed to get through and graduate,” Glenn-Copeland says of his then-partner. “But I just couldn’t manage it all emotionally. I just couldn’t.”
Soon after leaving McGill, Glenn-Copeland sold his oboe and used the money to buy a guitar. For the next few years, he played shows around Montreal and Toronto while gaining a reputation both as a formidable vocalist and as a songwriter of unmistakable, if unclassifiable, talent.
In 1970, at 26, he recorded two albums: the classically infused Beverly Copeland followed by the bluesier Beverly Glenn-Copeland. If the first continued several of the sonic traditions he had learned in school, the second found the artist blending genres from jazz and R&B to folk and traditional West African music, often while seeding his work with latent queer motifs.
As the classical musician and scholar Lazarus Letcher tells me, “Erzili,” the closing track of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, is a celebration of “the patron loa of queer and trans Haitians.” A hurtling, nearly 10-minute adventure through an acoustic and woodwind forest of divine possession, “Erzili” directly addresses the spirit and the transformations it conjured. “Thou hast possessed me,” Glenn-Copeland sings, “I can dance upon the clouds / I can dance upon the rainbows.”
In Voodoo, Santería, and other religious traditions that enslaved peoples practiced behind the trappings of Catholicism, the faithful can be “possessed or mounted by loas or orishas of any gender,” Letcher tells me.
When I ask him if he intended “Erzili” to register as a trans narrative, Glenn-Copeland explains the track “just came through him.” Still, he agrees that what passed through could have reflected aspects of his identity he’d only recognize years later.
“As trans artists, sometimes our music can out us before we’ve even come out to ourselves,” Letcher notes. “Glenn’s evocation of this protector of trans folks could be an example of that on a spiritual level.”
Glenn-Copeland does not write his songs; he translates them. Like a human radio, the artist remains attuned to transmissions from what he calls the “Universal Broadcasting System” (UBS), or the cosmic channel through which we communicate (wittingly or not) with the frequencies of the universe. The story of “Ever New,” as with the five other tracks that comprise Keyboard Fantasies, can be understood to begin nearly 14 billion years before my bath last summer, when the cosmos started to expand from a single, unimaginably dense point in space. Better known as the Big Bang, this moment created a “universal consciousness,” Glenn-Copeland tells me, which has continuously “sent information through to everything and everyone.”
Signals from the UBS have come to the artist throughout his life, yet few periods were as bountiful as the winter months of 1986. By then, Glenn-Copeland had traded the bustle of Montreal and Toronto for the lakes, birch trees, wrens, and bears of Muskoka county’s cottage country, located about half an hour north of Huntsville, Ontario, within the traditional territory of the Ojibwe and Potawatomi peoples. There, Glenn-Copeland shoveled snow, put food on the table for his family, and received the torrent of inspiration that coalesced into Keyboard Fantasies.
With some exceptions, the bright, meditative pieces that populate Keyboard Fantasies share few musical qualities with the vigorous, mournful tracks of his first two albums. Where Glenn-Copeland once sang of death, possession, and heartbreak, his attention on Keyboard Fantasies turns to new life, healing, and dancing through pain — an evolution that reflects several overlapping threads of the artist’s quiet life.
At the surface of the record is its incorporation of Glenn-Copeland’s tranquil surroundings, transmitted through electronic melodies that render the chirping of warblers, the ripples of freshwater, and the rush of wind through bare branches. Then there are his peaceful, gently instructive lyrics, which nod to his years spent practicing Soka Gakkai, a chant-heavy sect of Buddhism. Even the sparing way in which Glenn-Copeland layers his voice throughout the album suggests a connection to his upbringing in the Quaker community and his African ancestry.
As Letcher tells me, Glenn-Copeland’s delayed vocal entries, arriving sometimes minutes into a song, recall not only the Quaker tradition of unprogrammed worship, wherein practitioners wait to speak until moved by the spirit, but also West African gyil music. Gyil players, Letcher explains, often repeat a steady rhythm to prepare listeners to receive a song’s restorative qualities.
“It’s the same with Glenn,” they say. “He builds such a beautiful, solid, musical foundation that by the time the voice comes in, you can just fully lean back into those healing, healing words.”
The artist Kelsey Lu knows the feeling. They remember hearing Glenn-Copeland’s voice for the first time as being like “pure life shot through my body.” They were on tour at the time, in a daze from traveling, when “Ever New” streamed through their headphones. “Hearing him immediately referencing nature and its transformations — our blooms, our softnesses, our pain — I'd never connected to someone through music like I did with Glenn,” they tell me.
Throughout that tour and in the ensuing years, Lu continued looking to Glenn-Copeland’s work for support. “Any time depression would try to swallow me whole, I went back to Glenn,” they say. “I would return to his work and think: You can hold this. There’s so much of Earth in you, and Earth can hold this. Earth can always hold us.”
Keyboard Fantasies is, in many ways, an educational album. From the very first track, through the two-minute and fifteen second voiceless introduction to “Ever New,” Glenn-Copeland teaches the listener how to receive his aural medicine. Slow down. Take a breath, he seems to advise. And, when you’re ready, no matter the pain you might be feeling, try to dance. Just a little.
The record rewards the patient listener, its repetitions transforming from tedium into a spell of human interconnectedness. “Welcome the child whose hand I hold,” he sings on “Ever New,” proceeding to accompany the lyric with a perfect instrumental compliment. Just over halfway through the song, once the first vocal passage has come and gone, we hear a single melody rendered two ways. The same theme, played at different pitches, reenacts the demonstration and recitation of an instructor and pupil. After several measures of call and response, the melodies play in unison, as though themselves holding hands.
“He seems even more focused on the healing and teacher aspects of his artistry now,” the Swedish pop star Robyn writes in the liner notes to the recent reissue. “But it is on Keyboard Fantasies that his purpose seems to crystallize.”
The spiritual pedagogy at the heart of Keyboard Fantasies may in part flow from his career creating music for children’s television, a job he held throughout the production of the 1986 album. For some 25 years, Glenn-Copeland performed and composed regularly for Sesame Street and Mr. Dressup, the Canadian version of Mr. Rogers. The artist looks back on his time working on these shows with a measured gratitude: Although he adored spending time with and making music for children, he felt stifled by the heteronormative atmosphere on set.
Long before he recognized himself as trans, he felt the sting of being called by she pronouns and bristled at the routine assumption that, when it came time to put on a costume, he’d be given a female part.
“On the show, there was this magical box called the tickle trunk,” Glenn-Copeland tells me. “We’d open it up, and there would always be a kind of wild story that would give Mr. Dressup and me — and even the puppets, sometimes — a chance to put on some wild concoction. But because I was known as Beverly and ‘she,’ they never made me the pirate. They’d make me the unusual first mate who happened to be female.”
Glenn-Copeland makes a point to clarify that he never felt the cast or crew to be explicitly homophobic. “They all knew I was a lesbian, or what I considered to be a lesbian at that time,” he says. What they didn’t realize was that the guy who showed up to work in a shirt and pants everyday wasn’t comfortable consistently pretending to be a woman. “They didn’t know, because I didn’t tell them,” he says. “What were they supposed to do?”
In those days, not even the artist himself knew the words to communicate what he was feeling. He’d be in his fifties by the time he stumbled on language that described his identity.
One sunny day in 1995, on a beach in Cape Cod, Glenn-Copeland spent an afternoon reading the memoir of a trans activist. He doesn’t remember how the book got into his hands, though he’ll never forget the impact of reading the word “transgender.” The term crystallized an inkling he’d felt ever since flexing his muscles in front of the mirror as a kid. So that’s what’s been going on, he marveled.
Seven years later, after sharing his realization privately with his inner circle, he came out to all of Canada via one of the country’s most popular radio shows. “That was fabulous,” he tells me. “People who weren’t even gay or transgender called in to say they had to pull off the road...They’d cry and tell me that if you could go through what you went through, I can go through my stuff, too.”
For someone like Lazarus Letcher, the parallels between Glenn-Copeland’s hurdles and their own were far less abstract. Like Glenn-Copeland, Letcher grew up isolated from the slightest shred of information about what it meant to be trans — let alone that it was a blessing, not a disorder. When they first learned about the artist, they were astounded. A classically-trained musician who's also Black and transmasculine, they recall thinking. Why the fuck have I never heard of this person?
Letcher made up for lost time by devouring Glenn-Copeland’s discography, from the classical turns of his early work through the technological musings of Keyboard Fantasies all the way to his latest, fully original project, 2004’s Primal Prayer. Recorded under the alias Phynix, the 10-track collection tells yet another story of reinvention. This time, though, Glenn-Copeland turns his focus from the cycles of nature to more embodied forms of rebirth. Recorded after coming out as transgender, but also following a life-threatening health scare, the record constitutes an “outpouring of my life, warts and all,” as he writes in the liner notes.
That sense of primordial release is evident from his first vocal entrance — the thrilling, operatic note that begins “La Vita,” one of Glenn-Copeland’s most spiritually galvanizing pieces. Some four decades after his parents sought to institutionalize him because of his queerness, years after he promised his mother he’d never talk to her again, here he speaks of reconciliation: “And my mother says to me,” he sings, his slow vibrato suggesting a lifetime spent waiting to hear the next words, “enjoy your life.”
To be reborn, Glenn-Copeland implies, he had to be seen by those he loved as the person he was — to be extolled for living the life he chose. Through Primal Prayer, the artist transmits this experience to his listeners through a radically inclusive recasting of religion. “One of the things I wanted to do in Primal Prayer was affirm all the ways in which people experience the holy,” he tells me. A spiritual buffet, the album is peppered with references to Islamic teachings, Buddhist practices, and what Letcher calls a “delightfully revolutionary” take on the Black church.
“‘This Side of Graces’ starts off with the church organ, and you’re like, ‘Here we go, let me get my fan,’” Letcher says, adding, “But then the lyrics still feel rooted in traditional African religion. It’s such a radical reclaiming of our faith, not only in terms of our Black ancestors being forced into the box of Christianity, but also how trans people have been excluded from the church for decades.”
Letcher’s deep connection to Glenn-Copeland lends a somber resonance to the question they asked upon first encountering him: How had it taken so long to find this genius? At least according to one technician who worked on the artist’s second album, the answer might stem from the failure of record labels to market his unprecedented sound.
“We gave [the album] to GRT Records, and it was [their] job to market it,” says the unnamed technician in Dixon’s documentary. “And I know they had a hard time figuring it out. It’s a shame they didn’t see the light of day.”
Unpacking the factors that delayed Glenn-Copeland’s mainstream embrace is an especially significant subject for Montreal-based rapper and executive Blxck Cxsper, who founded the Black trans-centered record label Trans Trenderz last year. Cxsper has made it their mission to ensure current artists don’t have to wait so long to witness their work see the light of day.
“The thing is, if Glenn was my age right now, I bet he’d be making trap music,” Cxsper tells me. “Our songs are built in the same way. They have similar types of layering and melodies — these ways of using your voice to go low and high as an instrument. The spiritual elements, it’s all the same. It’s just mine has an 808 and autotune on it.”
For Cxsper, an essential part of respecting Glenn-Copeland’s legacy means honoring not only the artist himself, but also those he inspired.
“When we talk about recognizing our elders, when we talk about folks like Glenn, we have to also think of the next generation of Black trans artists,” they say. “If you want to respect the work folks like Glenn have done, people who only got famous toward the end of their lives, you can’t let that happen to us.”
When Ryota Masuko found a copy of Keyboard Fantasies one day in 2016, he was so moved by the record’s unplaceable beauty that he immediately sought out its creator. The email took Glenn-Copeland by surprise; he’d hardly heard anything about the album since releasing it himself some 30 years prior. Before Masuko’s inquiry, the most ardent supporters of Keyboard Fantasies were a contingent of mothers who liked to play the album to their infants at bedtime. Little did Glenn-Copeland know that the very same generation would grow up to fuel his meteoric resurgence.
As the legend goes, Masuko, who owns a rare record store in Niigata, Japan, bought the remaining stock of Keyboard Fantasies, sold the tapes with ease, and sparked a global fixation with the then-mysterious Canadian artist. Just two years after that fateful email exchange, swelling interest in Glenn-Copeland’s music paved the way for him to embark on an international tour. Joined by the band Indigo Rising, along with a film crew led by the director Posy Dixon, he took five decades of transmissions on the road.
One of their first stops was the legendary London avant-garde music venue, Cafe Oto, the kind of place, Dixon tells me, “where you’ll walk in and see someone sat in the front playing a loaf of bread with 100 people standing around them stroking their chins.” The reception wrought by the artist, then 74 years old, was unforgettable. Cafe Oto’s fashionable clientele became “like a room full of enraptured children,” Dixon says. “It was total awe.”
From there, the Glenn-Copeland party traveled across the continent, playing shows from concert halls in Leipzig to a climactic performance at Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? festival. Perhaps even more discombobulating for the septuagenarian than all the newfound attention was the fact that it confirmed a pair of predictions he had heard some 40 years earlier. While the first predicted his late-career resurgence, the second prophecy, Glenn-Copeland tells me, had to do with the fate of humanity.
“A generation is coming,” he recalls being told by a psychic sometime in the late ‘60s, “that is going to move our species from its adolescence into adulthood.” That night in Utrecht, when the artist saw around 2,500 young people waiting to hear him play, he realized the two predictions were connected: His music would help this new generation grow up. “It was an absolutely unprecedented feeling,” he says of the revelation. “I could go to a festival now and play for 10,000 people and it wouldn’t be the same.”
After so many years of isolation, he found purpose as an elder — one who is as willing to receive wisdom as he is to offer it. Toward the end of Dixon’s documentary, after a fan thanks Glenn-Copeland for his presence as an elder, the artist responds by expressing gratitude to them in turn: “Thank you,” he says, “for being my younger.”
"Younger." The term is vintage Glenn-Copeland — an affirmation that as a multi-generational human family, we all have something to offer. With “Ever New,” he underscores this sense of mutuality by greeting first-time listeners and devotees alike with the same benediction of collective spiritual growth: “Welcome to you both young and old / We are ever new.”
For Glenn-Copeland himself, facing the autumn of his time on this earth, there is deep satisfaction to be found in having witnessed those changes. “If I were to die after leaving this room,” he tells me, a calm settling across his face, “I have had the opportunity to see that we, as a species, are in the process of growing up.”
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