MOJO PRESENTS

For over 50 years, BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND has been a secret master of spiritual electronica, receiving inspiration from a “higher power” to provide healing songs for the disenfranchised. Now, he and his wife face long-deserved acclaim and grave new challenges with equanimity. “I can’t explain it, but I feel joyous,” he tells VICTORIA SEGAL .

AS A RULE, BEVERLY GLENN-COPELAND DOESN’T DREAM. THAT MIGHT SURPRISE anyone who’s heard the utopian synth visions of his 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies or the trance voyages of 2004’s Primal Prayer, but the 81-year-old composer, singer and activist insists that “I go to sleep within three seconds and I wake up within three seconds.”

Returning to Canada with his wife and collaborator Elizabeth Glenn-Copeland after playing autumn dates in Europe, however, he had a dream that stuck. “It was about how we were going to end up living in Ireland,” he says smiling, his arm around Elizabeth as they sit in their Hamilton sitting room, the glare of early snow coming in at the window.

In 2024, Glenn-Copeland announced he had been diagnosed with a form of dementia; finding a space to settle, a place where they can live, work and manage his health, is a matter that looms large in their lives. Their landlord is about to sell the house where they live – not the first time they have found themselves so precariously balanced. In 2020, with Glenn unable to make money from playing live, Elizabeth’s daughter Faith had to launch a fundraiser to secure the roof over their heads.

Not all the seismic change around Glenn-Copeland – known in daily life as Glenn – has been so challenging, though. In 2016, Japanese record collector Ryota Masuko wrote to him asking if he had any leftover stock of the 40-year-old Keyboard Fantasies, a record that Glenn-Copeland had self-released on 200 cassettes. Approximately 50 of those were sold, mainly to parents trying to soothe their babies with its kaleidoscopic lullabies – not unfitting for an artist who spent three decades working in children’s theatre and television (most notably on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show Mr Dressup).