There is a moment at the very end of "Laughter in Summer" — at the close of its final track, "Let Us Dance (Movement Two)" — where a hushed voice whispers, "That was exquisite." It's an aside caught on tape, the kind of thing you might edit out. Beverly Glenn-Copeland left it in. That instinct tells you everything about what this record is and isn't: it is not a polished farewell statement engineered for legacy. It is something rarer and more uncomfortable — a document of two people trying to hold onto each other while one of them is slowly slipping away.
Released on February 6, 2026, on Transgressive Records, "Laughter in Summer" is Glenn-Copeland's direct follow-up to 2023's "The Ones Ahead," and it arrives under the shadow of his LATE dementia diagnosis, which he disclosed publicly in September 2024. He is 82 years old. His wife, Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland — eco-poet, theatre actor, producer, life partner, and now his carer — is present on nearly every track, her voice a steady, limpid counterpoint to his. Crucially, she is also the album's primary producer, shaping the record alongside music director Alex Samaras; it is her artistic vision as much as his. The album is dedicated, implicitly and explicitly, to their nearly half-century together. It is also, as its sleeve notes make clear, a kind of memento mori.
What makes "Laughter in Summer" so quietly devastating is how it got made. The couple had been performing these songs on what Glenn-Copeland's team called his final tour. In 2024, before a Montreal performance, they were invited to spend a few days recording at Hotel2Tango studio — the same room where Godspeed You! Black Emperor have recorded — with engineer and producer Howard Bilerman. Elizabeth assembled a small choir, anchored by pianist and vocalist Alex Samaras and clarinettist Naomi McCarroll-Butler, and brought in singers including Helena Deland, Camille Deléan, Eugénie Jobin, Robin Love, Mara Nesrallah, Frédérique Roy, Alanna Stuart, and Adèle Trottier-Rivard. Every track on the album is a first take. There was no going back for another pass.
The record opens with "Let Us Dance (Movement One)," a song that first appeared on "Keyboard Fantasies," Glenn-Copeland's self-released 1986 cassette — the one that sat in obscurity for three decades until a Japanese collector named Ryota Masuko tracked him down in 2015 and set off the unlikely chain of events that made Glenn-Copeland a cult figure, then a genuinely celebrated one. Here, stripped of its synthesizer shimmer and rebuilt around choir voices and sparse piano, it sounds like a hymn with no church affiliation required. "Ever New," the album's second track, also originates from "Keyboard Fantasies," and the choir — soaring around Glenn-Copeland's expressively tender voice — injects it with a majestic, profoundly moving pull. "Children's Anthem," the lead single released ahead of the album, dates from the couple's early years together, originally penned for a teachers' workshop on bullying; here it becomes something more universal, a passing of the torch to the next generation.
The album's title track is its emotional center. Glenn-Copeland hums a wordless melody while Elizabeth sings the verses — a role reversal that speaks volumes about where they are now. "Harbour," originally written by Glenn-Copeland as a birthday gift for Elizabeth and first released on "The Ones Ahead," is transformed here into a sunlit duet, brighter and more tender than its source. "Middle Island Lament," which Elizabeth largely leads, reflects on the experiences of immigrants to Canada's East Coast, where the couple lived for years. "Shenandoah" — a traditional American folk song Glenn-Copeland first heard his mother sing as a child in Philadelphia — is given to the choir, and it lands like a hand on a shoulder. The title track itself began life as part of a series of instrumentals Glenn-Copeland started composing after his diagnosis, pieces he called "Songs With No Words." That origin matters: these are melodies that existed before language, before narrative, before the need to explain anything.
Glenn-Copeland's story resists easy summarization, which is part of why it keeps drawing people in. He was among the first Black students admitted to McGill University. He wrote for Sesame Street. He spent decades composing music for Canadian children's television under the name Beverly Copeland, largely invisible to the music world that would eventually claim him. He began publicly identifying as a trans man in the early 2000s, long before the wider culture caught up. He has received mainstream endorsements from Bon Iver and Sam Smith. None of those facts, stacked up, quite prepares you for the experience of hearing his voice — still impossibly rich at 82, multi-octave, undefeated — move through these nine first-take performances with the kind of grace that doesn't come from technique alone.
"Laughter in Summer" is not an easy listen in the way that phrase is usually meant. It does not soothe by keeping you at a safe distance. It asks you to sit with love and loss at the same time, which is, of course, the only honest way to sit with either.
