Beverly Glenn-Copeland has made peace with death, but that doesn’t mean he’s ready to go. In 2023, Copeland was diagnosed with LATE, a form of dementia similar to Alzheimer’s. His doctors recommended that he stay home and do crossword puzzles; Copeland chose to go on tour. He knew that he still had too much to do and too much to give. He continued to write, perform, and record, and Laughter in Summer is the unexpected result—a joyous album made during a time of grief, a declaration that love is much bigger than life.
The performances on Laughter in Summer are at once nostalgic and bracingly present. Copeland was invited to prepare for a Montreal concert at the famed Hotel2Tango studio in 2023, joined by his wife Elizabeth, music director Alex Samaras, and a choir of Canadian singers. The session was only meant as a rehearsal, but upon listening back to the recording they realized that it deserved to be released as an album. Every song, both new and old, was captured in one take (sometimes to the bemusement of his singers), with sparse arrangements for piano, choir, and clarinet. It’s a bravura performance from Copeland: He fosters spontaneity while maintaining careful control, strips his songs bare to display their elegance. Laughter in Summer serves as a summary of Copeland’s career, but it’s also a portrait of the artist in his last act: confident, generous, and unafraid.
The breakthrough moment of Copeland’s career came in 2015, via an email from a Japanese record store owner inquiring about a long out-of-print 1986 cassette, Keyboard Fantasies. That interest led to a reissue of the record, whose peaceful lyrics and extensive use of the Yamaha DX7 resonated with a generation newly fascinated with new age. Copeland suddenly found himself navigating public life as a musical pioneer and a trans elder. In quick succession came a documentary, a covers album, a career-spanning compilation, and finally, new music. It’s fitting, then, that Laughter in Summer begins with two standout tracks from that pivotal album. Copeland counts us in on “Let Us Dance (Movement One),” and piano, clarinet, and choir fall neatly into place around his impossibly rich contralto. He savors every syllable like an encounter with an old friend, and his pleasure animates the studio. “Ever New” is the keystone of Copeland’s discography (Elizabeth has called it “the centerpiece of everything”) because its theme of regeneration is eternally relevant. But in this context, its gentle insistence that “We are ever new” is especially poignant—for Copeland as a Buddhist facing mortality, it reads like an affirmation, a mantra, an apt reminder from his past self.
The renaissance that resulted from the rediscovery of Keyboard Fantasies would not have been possible without Elizabeth. She saw him perform when she was young, encountered his music again a decade later, and finally reached out in the ’90s. It wasn’t until 2007, though—after a dream in which she saw him atop a hill, backlit by the moon—that the two became partners. Since then, Elizabeth has been as important to Copeland’s professional life as his personal life, co-founding a children’s theater school with him, arranging his music, and supporting him as he was launched from obscurity. “Harbour” was originally written as a birthday gift to Elizabeth. 2023’s The Ones Ahead features a full-band version with multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Costello singing the duet; here, Elizabeth takes her place as Copeland’s second so that each line becomes a vow between lovers. On the title track, Elizabeth gets her first writing credit in Copeland’s oeuvre by providing lyrics to one of a series of instrumentals titled “Songs With No Words,” composed after his dementia diagnosis. Sitting next to a lake, she reminisced about their time together: “Laughter in summer/How I remember/June through September/Here with you.” A brooding piano line and Copeland’s wordless singing introduce her vocals in a bittersweet play of light and dark, like the sun breaking through the clouds once more before setting.
As a performer on Canadian children’s show Mr. Dressup, a writer on Sesame Street, and a teacher at a theater school, Copeland learned to write with disarming simplicity. A song like “Children’s Anthem,” with its directive to “let them play and let them learn/And let them prosper day by day,” is not an exception in his songwriting but the demonstration of a rule: Everyone should be included. Like Don Cherry’s work with his Organic Music Theatre, Copeland’s goal is to create communal experiences by inviting young and old alike to participate. “This thing where only some people go on stage and perform is a recent, bad turn of events,” he told The Wire magazine in 2020. “It used to be, in all our cultures, that we danced and sang together.” Laughter in Summer, with its easy, open collaboration, puts this philosophy into effect—if this is a celebration of his and Elizabeth’s love, it’s also a celebration of the community that they have fostered.
One song on Laughter in Summer defines Copeland’s evolution, both musical and spiritual. It took him decades to write “Prince Caspian’s Dream” because, after the first two lines came to him, he felt he wasn’t yet wise enough to finish it. He would return to those lines once every 10 years until the rest was revealed. Copeland debuted the song on The Ones Ahead, but this stripped down performance is definitive. “Life is a part of love/The living art of love,” he croons, before continuing on to the new lines: “Life is the heart of love, this I know/I give my days into its keeping/Though sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping.” As he guides the choir through a wordless melody, you can sense his patient, encouraging presence. At the end of the track, Copeland whispers a message that could simultaneously describe the song, his love, or his life: “Oh, that was exquisite.”
