Career revival

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This article was published 04/09/2018 (2872 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Many artists claim to be before their time, but in the case of Beverly Glenn-Copeland, it is unequivocally true.

The 74-year-old award-winning transgender singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and playwright now based in New Brunswick has only within the past year been getting attention for musical works he released decades ago.

A Japanese collector recently rediscovered Glenn-Copeland’s work and asked him to send over some cassettes of his 1986 album, Keyboard Fantasies; two years later and the album was being reissued on vinyl in 2017, bringing it to an entirely new generation of listeners.

Glenn-Copeland’s self-titled debut was also re-released in 2017 and he is heading out on a multi-city tour with his band, Indigo Rising, which brings him to the West End Cultural Centre Thursday night.

Some artists would lament the fact recognition came so late in their career, but not Glenn-Copeland; he believes success came when he was most ready for it.

“There’s no doubt I would have enjoyed it (earlier) but there’s also the reality of when are you really ready for something, right? And I am a very slow in my way through the world, I relate to the great tortoise, which is you take a step and you nibble some grass and then you take another step,” Glenn-Copeland says.

“Though in all truth I also, because I feel the music that I was writing all those years ago was really going to be most understood by the generation that was born in the ‘80s. So that being true, I have no regrets whatsoever, I’m just taking a lot of vitamins,” he laughs.

In reality, Glenn-Copeland has been in front of Canadian eyes and ears all along; he spent more than two decades working as a regular actor and musical contributor on the CBC show Mr. Dressup, one of the most famous children’s television series in Canadian history.

“It was a very important show for me as well… I’m eternally a kid and I got to be a kid, and the same time I got to write music for it. So I got to be crazy and wild and put on crazy things and explore the part of me that had wanted to be a Canadian, that all worked for beautifully,” says the American-born performer who moved to Canada in the early 1960s to attend McGill University’s faculty of music, with the intention of becoming a classical singer.

During his Mr. Dressup years, Glenn-Copeland performed as a female; though he realized he was transgender while working on the show, he made the decision to wait until his time at Mr. Dressup had concluded in 2002 before publicly announcing himself as a transgender male. This was not because the show had asked him to conceal his true self, but because he felt it would be difficult for the show’s young viewers to deal with.

“It started before Mr. Dressup, in terms of my understanding of who I was… you know when you don’t have language for something it’s hard to define it, language comes as we change in terms of our understanding. So at one point I suddenly realized, ‘Oh, that’s what’s been going on all these years.’ But I was still doing the Mr. Dressup show, so I thought, ‘Beverly-she today and Beverly-he tomorrow, that’s not going to cut it, that’s going to be a transition that’ll be a bit hard for people to understand,’” he explains with a laugh.

Despite the emotional and physical changes, Glenn-Copeland says his transition had no affect on his creative output, either positively or negatively.

His past work is a reflection of his soul — one that, even over the phone, is so clearly kind, creative, strong and full of joy — and that is something that does not change, whether he was pioneering electronic music experimentation, embracing a more folk-influenced sound or penning fun and educational tunes for kids on Mr. Dressup or his other high-profile children’s gig, Sesame Street.

“I haven’t… that definition for me is only something that is carried out in the outward world with the me that has been me since I was a child. My mother told me this — and she didn’t tell me until she was 89 or something like that — she said, ‘Well, you said you were a boy when you were three,’ but that was 1947, so who’s going to pay any attention to that?” he says.

“So who I was all those years I just was, I just didn’t have definitions for it, there wasn’t anything different about who it was that was creating this music.”

erin.lebar@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @NireRabel