This voice was silent for more than two decades before the live-in-studio album THE ONES AHEAD was released in 2023. Only a few years before had Beverly Glenn-Copeland achieved prominence, a delayed echo of the late-discovered 1970s and 1980s singer/songwriter and New Age synthesizer fantasies of the singer and composer, who began to identify as a trans man after the turn of the millennium.
Beverly Glenn-Copeland is now 81 years old and is now releasing this collection of songs inspired by the long-standing love story with theater actress and producer Elizabeth Copeland. LAUGHTER IN SUMMER is not a celebration with gold rims and orchestral pathos – the Copeland duo feeds their book of memories with quiet joys, with images of community, miniatures of sadness; at a time when Beverly Glenn-Copeland has learned to live with dementia. “Let Us Dance” is the centerpiece, recorded with piano and choir at the Hotel2Tango in Montreal.
More than its predecessor, Beverly’s voice is at the forefront, gentle and powerful at the same time, often in a duo with Elizabeth, sailing on a spiritual wave. Over the course of his illness, Beverly had begun to write a series of instrumentals which he called “Songs With No Words”, and listeners would please write their own lyrics to them. At some point he played one of these songs to Elizabeth, then there were more, and these songs were looking for voices. That was the beginning of something like a declaration of love for being together – in the ever-present feeling of increasing loss. The songs dance nimbly around this dualism.
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.
