There Is Life Here
New Music 09/02/26
I haven’t been as moved by an album as Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s recently released, Laughter in Summer, for a long time. Beverly Glenn-Copeland is a miracle really, a trans man who, for most of his life, made music that was never recognised. When Glenn was 71, a collector tracked him down and asked if he still had any copies of his very beautiful 1986 album, Keyboard Fantasies. This lead to reissues, new recordings, his first international live shows and at 82 he’s still touring. He also suffers from dementia. Another miracle then, is that this album was made at all and that this journey through already established songs feels less like a revisiting and more like a reanimation of them, an ode to the future, a celebration of life rather than loss. While his memory is slowly being taken from him, he sings about welcoming the spring, about dancing down a road, about how someone’s love can be a promise of tomorrow. There is so much life spun into this album, so much hope.
Last year my father was diagnosed with dementia, and as I listened to this album I thought a lot about him, about what happens to who we are when we start to not be able to remember our lives and the people we love, when our once quotidian tasks become strange and unsettling, or when we get lost in one of our memories, stuck in a place or a time that no longer exists.
For all of us, memory is an often unsturdy thing. We’re good at turning our lives into stories, at choosing the things we want to remember, at smoothing out and stretching our memories like dough. When someone starts to lose their memory, or to have it blur with reality, you can forget a little bit that life is still happening, that you can still have beautiful moments remembered or not, that living is the thing. So I feel incredibly grateful to this album and to the miraculous man that made it, for looking forward rather than back, for the reminder that even in the face of loss there are songs to be sung and children’s hands to hold and summer blooming flowers, that there is life here.
I hope you find time to listen to this beautiful album in full. To add to that on the playlist this week there’s a music theory lesson, a voice like a sexy cloud and a band who should consider changing their name. Happy listening!
From now on I’ll be using Bandcamp links where possible for the individual tracks, not sure why I didn’t do this from the start! Spotify and Apple Music playlists as usual. I had a request for Qobuz, but unfortunatley it doesn’t work in South Africa yet. If you have a streaming service you’d like me to look into adding the playlists to please let me know!
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
APPLE MUSIC PLAYLIST
There’s a wonderful video of Beverly Glenn-Copeland and his partner, Elizabeth Copeland performing this together, just them accompanied by a piano, bright and simple. This new duet version of a song from his 2023 album The Ones Ahead, a song titled there as Harbour (Song For Elizabeth), sounds even richer now, as dense as pudding, a few more years of life and perspective in it.
Maddie Ashman is a musician from London with a particular predilection for microtonal music. (Incredible what a long way the word predilection goes to making someone sound like a pervert). Maybe you have no idea what this means? Music theory time! Western music typically uses a 12 tone scale, that means the smallest space between a note is the space between the black and white keys on a piano, which are called semitones. But there are notes between the notes! So between a middle C and a C sharp (the middle note of the piano and the black key to the right of it) there is a note that you can’t play on the piano (unless you were to retune it) called C half sharp. You can imagine the possibilities this opens up, a veritable bouquet of new pitches. If you want to hear a very clear example of microtonality being used this video of a performance of Charles Ives Three Quarter Tone Pieces, is a great place to start. One of the pianos uses standard tuning and one is tuned a quarter tone apart, which creates this swampy, slightly threatening feeling. Now watch Maddie Ashman also retune her piano to create this wonderful song, which sounds a lot more straightforward than it is.
Not long after releasing her debut album in 2018, Gia Margaret now 38, experienced a vocal injury that left her unable to sing. Because of this she was forced to focus on instrumental music, creating an ambient record Mia Gargaret in 2020 and the instrumental Romantic Piano in 2023. This upcoming album, Singing (she is very literal with her album names) features her once again using her voice, and this first soft and textural single feels a little indebted to her time working only as an instrumentalist. The full album, out in April, will have some fun collaborations: Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth (exciting), Gregorian chant by ILĀ (very exciting) and also “turntable scratches” (not sure why this was mentioned in the album write up, not exciting.)
Meg Lui really has the voice of a woman who grew up, as her bio states, “along the old highway connecting Folsom and Auburn.” You, like me, have probably not heard of her before, but you might have heard her voice, which she’s lent to projects with Sufjan Stevens (who collaborates on this song) and John Legend.
This song sounds like a crush (although it’s about a breakup) all gossamer winged and humid. I love a voice like this, impossible to be mad when someone is singing like a sexy cloud.
It's been nearly six years since Thundercat’s last solo album, but this April he’ll be back with Distracted, and this is the third single from the album. A lot of people do not like Lil Yachty’s verse here, but me, I like it! Otherwise it’s a pretty typical Thundercat track with its groovy bassline and catchy hook.
So the thing you need to know about this album is that for about eight years, J. Cole has been teasing it, and has implied that it will be his last album. If it is indeed a sendoff, at 101-minutes with 24 tracks, it leaves us with a lot to listen to. On this final track from Disc 1 he airs his feelings toward some of his idols, suggesting that they need to find the spark again in making music, that maybe he can help them (bold) and that he needs them to do that so that he can keep his own motivation alive. There’s something actually touching about this track, a real sense of innocence and awe lost, a longing for something he acknowledges he probably can’t get back.
Ratboys, a band I had never heard of, have in fact been making music for over a decade, and this album feels like the one that might finally give them the recognition they deserve. Tbh I really do not think their name is helping!
Beautiful opening. Now listening to this miraculous album.