Ever New

Upon its release in 1986, Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Keyboard Fantasies “sounded like it was recorded in a future that hadn’t yet come to pass,” writes Bijan Stephen. Three decades later, the album’s unlikely rediscovery brought new appreciation to a musician whose work is “very clearly the product of a lifetime of moral thinking.” Stephen’s appreciation casts Glenn-Copeland as an artist at once deeply concerned with his time and yet operating outside its usual boundaries. There’s an anecdote that Glenn-Copeland has shared with a few interviewers: when he was young a fortune teller told him he wouldn’t be successful until he was very old. He was seventy-one the year Keyboard Fantasies was rediscovered and made him into a world-touring musician. Perhaps that mystic had seen something in him for which we didn’t yet have the words, something for which the world would have to wait. But I don’t think it’s wise to put too much stock in what a person behind a crystal ball says, if only because imagining what-ifs can easily distract you from the business of living. The present is all we really have, and it is an astonishing, impossible gift. And that’s Glenn-Copeland’s great subject—the beautiful improbability that we are all here together. Finding his music again feels right because it’s a connection we sorely needed and nearly missed.