A Pioneer of Electronic Music Reanimates Old Songs

The project evolved out of an informal recording session. In the summer of 2025, the Copelands were offered two free days in a studio in Montreal, and they hired a choir to sing with them. In a recent video call, Elizabeth told me, “It was just, let’s put this stuff down so we have it to listen to.” They sang a new version of “Let Us Dance” with the choir, then mixed another recording from the choir’s warmups; the two versions both appear on the album, as “Let Us Dance (Movement One)” and “Let Us Dance (Movement Two),” the opener and closer, respectively. The two takes sound similar, but they both differ mightily from the original, which was accompanied by synthesizers layered atop the note of wind chimes rhythmically clattering, and keyboard effects that mimicked the tone of short horn bursts. Copeland’s voice sounds as rich and flexible as it did back then. Elizabeth told me that the songs serve as a reminder to young musicians about the virtues of live, unadulterated recordings. “So many of them rely on the tricks in the studio–put a little Auto-Tune here, a little A.I. there, let’s add, subtract, multiply, and divide,” she said. “There’s not a lot of artists these days who can go in and do something live off the floor one time. The album is what you heard. If you were standing in the room that day, that’s what you would’ve heard.”

During our call, the couple sat, shoulder to shoulder, in a teal room in their home in Hamilton, Ontario, backdropped by books and records. Elizabeth did most of the talking. In September of 2024, Copeland revealed that he’d been diagnosed with dementia, and that they’d been managing the disease privately for some time. “Laughter in Summer” is the first album since the revelation, but it would be a moving project even without the reality of the illness’s mounting toll. There is a sense of wonder on the new recordings, a search for the depths of a single piece, or a single place, or a single emotional curiosity. The songs find an artist picking through his established works and seeing which parts of them might be illuminated anew. It’s moving, too, because there is no evading the humanness of this record—the collision of actual human voices working in tandem. Elizabeth told me, “To practice any craft, you have to be able to listen and hear the world—hear something other than yourself.”

“Children’s Anthem,” one of the first creative collaborations between Elizabeth and Beverly as a couple, written in 2007 for an anti-bullying conference, is revived on “Laughter in Summer” as a sparse piano-and-voice duet. Toward the end of the track, when Beverly and Elizabeth’s voices blend together, the singing begins to feel spiritual, more like a prayer for an aching world than an ode to those who must endure it. “Harbour,” originally from “The Ones Ahead,” features Elizabeth singing a love song that Beverly wrote to her, providing the breathtaking experience of hearing the “you” in the lyrics become a two-way mirror: “Don’t you know that you’re the deep / Where water, earth and fire meet?” This is not the transformation typical of a cover song or a rerecording. It is a confirmation of reciprocal attention and admiration. The choral elements on the record shine most vividly on the title track, which features polyphonic swells of voices humming melodies, overtaking the piano, dropping and then rising again.

There is a simplicity to a song like “Children’s Anthem” that comes, undoubtedly, from Copeland’s years of making music for children, who need to be able to hear and understand and, hopefully, sing along. I told the couple that I was hesitant to use the word “simple,” because it sounded almost derogatory. “Well, it’s not simple in an inane kind of way,” Elizabeth said. “It’s simple because it has to make a lot of space. It has to make a lot of space for much of life’s joys and sorrows. We make our songs the way we do because we want to leave room for clarity of generosity, of warmth. Because we are at a critical juncture. There are things to be terrified of. But our power is about awakening something beyond fear and cynicism in the human nervous system. Our songs attempt to remind people that simplicity, and innocence, is a kind of power.” Beverly, a longtime practicing Buddhist, told me that he doesn’t really consider himself to be the creator of his music. “I feel that the songs are sent from a higher source. And when they arrive you can say yes or no to them. The good news is that, so far, I have said yes.” Elizabeth replied that she’s never seen him say no, and Beverley smiled, then said, “No, I suppose I haven’t. But there may be a time when I no longer have the facilities to say yes.”