ARTS & CULTURE / SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2023
Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Late Bloom
It took thirty years for the world to discover the singer-songwriter. Is fame worth waiting for?
BY SIMON LEWSEN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY SARAH PALMER
Published 6:30, Jul. 28, 2023
When his big career break finally came, Beverly Glenn-Copeland was seventy-three years old and living in a state of financial uncertainty. Throughout his life, he’d been a classical vocalist, a touring musician, a recording artist, and a children’s songwriter, but he’d lived in relative obscurity—and sometimes in poverty too. In the early 2010s, he and Elizabeth, his wife and creative partner, had a theatre school in Miramichi, New Brunswick, where community members created musicals together, some based on folktales or Celtic lore. But in 2015, the region suffered an economic downturn and the school closed. “We had no idea what we were going to do,” Elizabeth recalls.
Then, in 2016, Glenn-Copeland—who today goes by the name Glenn—got an email from a man he didn’t know: Ryota Masuko, a record-store owner in Niigata, Japan, who specializes in undiscovered music. Masuko wanted to buy copies of Keyboard Fantasies, an album Glenn had made in 1986 while living in Sprucedale, a village near the Muskoka region of Ontario. At the time, he had self-released Keyboard Fantasies with a run of 200 cassettes, of which he’d sold roughly eighty. “I don’t know how anybody could’ve found out about it,” Glenn says. “I was just happy somebody wanted it.”
He sent Masuko a box of thirty tapes and, a week later, a box of thirty more. Masuko sold the cassettes in his store and uploaded clips to his website, an international hub for audiophiles. Soon, Glenn was sending tapes to the US and the Netherlands too. In 2017, he received another unexpected email, this time from Brandon Hocura, co-founder of the Séance Centre, a label in Picton, Ontario. Together, Glenn and Hocura planned to reissue Keyboard Fantasies on vinyl and eventually on online platforms. In a moment of financial uncertainty, a lifeline had materialized. Since the rerelease of Keyboard Fantasies in 2017, its tracks have been streamed over a million times.
Listeners are drawn to the album for its hearth-like warmth. Despite being made with dance-club technologies—an Atari computer, a synthesizer, and a drum machine—the record feels liturgical, with repetitive motifs that mimic the rhythms of prayer. Keyboard Fantasies has “an intimate sound,” Masuko says, “that made me feel Glenn’s body temperature.” Julia Hotler, a Los Angeles composer, is part of a cohort of leading musicians who are now avowed Glenn-Copeland fans. (The list also includes Romy Madley Croft, co–lead singer of the indie band the xx, and Justin Vernon, the hip hop producer and songwriter who records as Bon Iver.) Hotler attributes Glenn’s popularity to the way his songs convey hope. “His music has a rare positivity,” she says. “It’s not simply happy but expansive and enveloping. Music that invites you to feel magic or wondrousness—I believe this is what young people want and need.”
Although beloved of DJs and fellow songwriters, Glenn is perhaps most revered today among queer and trans youth, who consider him an elder. Though he knew he was male at age three, Glenn lived the first five decades of his life as a woman. In the mid-1990s, however, he read Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, a classic of queer fiction, which introduced him to the term “trans.” Finally, he had the language to describe himself.
Both the art and the backstory have garnered Glenn international attention. Since 2018, he has embarked on three tours, one in Canada and two across Europe. In 2020, Keyboard Fantasies won a Polaris Heritage Prize, which honours classic Canadian albums by the likes of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Oscar Peterson. A new record, The Ones Ahead —Glenn’s first in nearly twenty years—is out July 28. Unlike his others, it’s being released into a world full of people eager to hear it.
Fame, of course, can be destabilizing at any age, but it’s particularly dizzying when it arrives in what would normally be an artist’s retirement years. For Glenn, however, it was somehow both expected and surprising. “I always knew I’d be famous posthumously,” he says. “I didn’t think I’d live to see it happen.”
Glenn was born Beverly Anne Glenn in 1944 to African American parents in Philadelphia. His mother, an early childhood educator, was the first Black woman to graduate from Penn State, and his father, an athlete and mathematician, would sit behind the piano for five hours a day, working through pieces by Bach and Chopin. Neither parent was particularly religious, but as a ten-year-old, Glenn attended a Black church in his neighbourhood. He soon decided that he disliked the preacher’s oracular speaking style and fire-and-brimstone sermons. So his mother took him to Quaker meetings, which had an ecumenical approach to worship. “We sat in silence, which I appreciated,” Glenn recalls. “There was no minister. When you felt moved to speak, you could get up and share your thoughts.”
In 1961, he commenced a degree in classical vocals at McGill University. He was the only Black student in the music program at the time and, as far as he knew, the only out lesbian his peers in an all-girls dormitory had ever met. They feared and shunned him, and he boldly walked hand in hand with his girlfriend in the hallways. The assistant dean of women eventually tried to have him expelled, although the dean of women ultimately overrode the decision.
When Glenn visited Philadelphia one summer, his parents took him to a doctor, who recommended that he be institutionalized and subjected to electroshock therapy. He fled out the door and into a phone booth. “In the directory, I ran my finger down a list of nearby doctors,” Glenn says. “I stopped at one name in particular, I don’t know why.” He walked briskly to the man’s clinic, with his parents following. The doctor took him into an office for a consultation and then emerged, minutes later, to explain to Glenn’s parents that they’d been wrong to medicalize their child’s sexuality. They backed off, allowing him to return to Montreal.
He still remembers the soundscape of the city. One year in May, members of the Black Watch, a reserve infantry regiment of the Canadian Armed Forces, paraded past his McGill dormitory, playing the bagpipes. When he heard the noise—a reedy melody combined with an apian drone—he felt electrified. “I ran to the window,” he says, “and started to weep.” He wanted to evoke a similar experience with music, to create otherworldly sounds that bypass listeners’ rational faculties and appeal to their primal selves.
In 1970, he added “Copeland” to his name (an homage to the American composer Aaron Copland), moved to Toronto, and joined the city’s famously eclectic folk scene. Even in that milieu, Glenn’s music was difficult to place. It was racy, spooky, and weird. His self-titled debut—which he recorded at the CBC studios in Montreal before leaving the city—fuses dark folk with modal jazz. The most idiosyncratic track is “Swords of Gold,” a tale of devastation and loss, which sounds less like a folk song and more like an operatic work by Alban Berg, the master of creepy atonalism. His 1971 follow-up—also self-titled—features songs like “Ghost House,” a ballad about a character who dreams of an encounter with the spirit of an ex-lover, and “Erzili,” a ten-minute epic about desire and ecstasy, in which Glenn yodels and wails and strums violently on the muted strings of his guitar, turning it into a drum.
Audiences didn’t know what to make of these releases. The albums sold poorly, and the tastemakers of the era mostly ignored them. “If the Mariposa Folk Festival [a musical showcase in Southern Ontario] had welcomed Glenn with open arms, that would’ve raised his profile considerably,” says Nicholas Jennings, a journalist and historian of Canadian popular music. “But he was too unconventional for the purists at Mariposa.”
In the early ’70s, Glenn moved with a girlfriend to Los Angeles and worked in a flower shop, where he was visited by a group of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhists, practitioners of a meditation regimen from thirteenth-century Japan. When he returned to Canada in 1973—after being hired to write music for an experimental film, Montreal Main—he brought with him a gohonzon, a sacred calligraphic scroll. (Twice a day, Nichi-ren Buddhists kneel in front of their gohonzon and chant the words “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo,” a Japanese mantra.) Glenn lived peripatetically in and around Toronto. For a time, he stayed in a communal house, where lovers and ex-lovers cohabitated and people slept wherever they could find space.
He made what money he could by road-tripping around Southern Ontario, playing lecture halls, outdoor festivals, coffee houses with low ceilings, community theatres with subpar PA systems, and swanky clubs with velvet curtains. He’d perform for three hours, switching between drums and piano, then load his equipment into his Datsun station -wagon and return to the city, often in the dead of night.
Kim Deschamps, a pedal-steel guitarist who would later play with the Cowboy Junkies and Blue Rodeo, accompanied Glenn on hundreds of those excursions. Glenn encouraged Deschamps to play his instrument in new ways. Deschamps learned, for instance, that by manipulating his volume pedal, he could conjure ghostly tones that materialize slowly, like distant light on a dark road, and by using two amplifiers, he could produce a full-bodied sound, more befitting a cello than a honky-tonk guitar. Gradually, Glenn amassed a small but loyal audience—older folkies, young hippies, gay men and women who were thrilled to see one of their own on stage.
Then the disco era hit, and many clubs abandoned live shows for pre-recorded music. For musicians, it felt like an entire economy had died. Iconic Toronto venues, like the Colonial Tavern on Yonge Street or the Riverboat Coffee House in Yorkville, shuttered for good, and many musicians sought other kinds of work. In 1982, Glenn decamped for Sprucedale, in Muskoka, with his then girlfriend, Evelyn Wolff, a psychotherapist and stained-glass artist. “Pretty much everybody was walking away,” Deschamps says.
In Sprucedale, the couple lived in a bungalow off the highway. They shovelled waist-high snow off their roof, gathered kindling for their wood-burning stove, and subsisted on income from Wolff’s part-time psychotherapy practice and whatever Glenn could make writing songs for Sesame Street and the children’s variety show Mr. Dressup, on which he was a regular guest. “We were never going to have enough money for Glenn to hire backup musicians,” says Wolff. So she blew through her retirement savings to buy him an Atari computer, a Roland TR-707 drum machine, and a Yamaha DX 7—the commercial synthesizer that produced nearly all the glossy sounds of the ’80s, from Whitney Houston’s syrupy keyboards to the chunky bass on Kenny Loggins’s “Danger Zone.”
At first, Glenn had no idea how to use those technologies, but he was fascinated by them nevertheless. His first computer had been a small hand-held device, which he’d bought a few years earlier. “I’d walk around the house with the computer in my arms,” he says. He’d also stroke it or sing to it, willing it to divulge its secrets. The Atari was more user friendly, though, and after years of solo experimentation, he experienced a kind of mind meld with the machine.
In 1986, he began working feverishly from sundown to dawn. He wasn’t composing, he believes, so much as transmitting—receiving signals from the atmosphere and conveying them into the instruments. By layering DX 7 effects overtop one another, he conjured unusually complex tones: timbres as thick as oil paint, as gritty as river water, as resonant as plainsong beneath a cathedral vault. He wrote expansive songs, in which long tones merge like stars colliding, and cacophonous songs, which conjure a dense woodland, with bird-like chimes above a rhythmic underbrush of bass and hi‑hat. After months of round-the-clock labour, he emerged with Keyboard Fantasies. “The music came zooping out of me,” he recalls. “Whenever I listen to it, I think: How the heck did I do any of that?”
