Beverly Glenn-Copeland has had a rollercoaster of a year- plans for a world tour fell through due to the pandemic and turned into a housing hunt for the New Brunswick artist. But it wasn’t all downsides, as a retrospective compilation, Transmissions: The Music of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, was released in September. And now the innovative new-age musician has been announced as one of this year’s Slaight Family Polaris Heritage Prize winners.
The Polaris Heritage Prize aims to honour albums of distinction that would have been considered for the Polaris Prize before it began in 2006. Glenn-Copeland’s mesmerizing Keyboard Fantasies shares the win this year with Buffy Sainte-Marie’s It’s My Way! and Main Source’s Breaking Atoms.
Keyboard Fantasies is a blissfully touching album. The tones of the electronic instruments and the production quality of an old Atari computer may fill our ears with nostalgia now, but to think of these bounding reflections and haiku-like lyrics in the context of their 1986 release shows them predicting massive trends. The album blossoms with the artist’s influences of both sci-fi and Buddhism. Unfortunately, Canadian listeners weren’t enamoured with the sound at the time. But Glenn-Copeland’s tranquil mix of the synthetic with deeply humanist themes hits perhaps even harder today.
Glenn-Copeland’s life has been a fascinating journey. Born and raised in Philadelphia, he decided to attend the McGill music program in 1961 and set his roots down in Canada ever since. Along with Keyboard Fantasies, he released a handful of other albums throughout the 70s and 80s, but none of them landed. It resulted in the artist stepping back from music for quite a while, but it was then that Glenn-Copeland came into one of the most recognized roles of his career: an actor on the iconic children’s show Mr. Dressup.
Decades passed. Glenn-Copeland continued working on Mr. Dressup, wrote for Sesame Street, settled in New Brunswick, and came out as trans in the early 2000s. Life carried on.
And then in 2016, Japanese music collector Ryota Masuko discovered one of the 50 cassettes of Keyboard Fantasies. He contacted Glenn-Copeland asking for more, and the momentum of interest took off from there. Now, the once brushed-over artist is enjoying deep appreciation from a worldwide fanbase that he says he never expected.
“All those years ago when I wrote this music, my wish was that I might be able to sell the few copies my little company was able to press. I could not have known that 35 years later this music would be reaching people worldwide, much less receiving this award.”
Despite decades of obscurity, living openly as an often marginalized community in the arts, and all recent difficulties, Beverly Glenn-Copeland seems to have maintained a sobering optimism. And that lifelong positivity may be best summed up by the artist’s own lyrics:
“Welcome the spring, the summer rain,
Softly turn 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”