2020 best reissue: Beverly Glenn-Copeland

Beverly Glenn-Copeland – Transmissions (Transgressions).

Is it a comeback story if no one knew who you were? Are you a late bloomer if you've been performing for 50 years? No, the incredible story of Beverly Glenn-Copeland is one of a new generation's discovery of the right artist at the right time and place.

Here's the short version of the story: a Philadelphia woman attends McGill as one of the first black students and certainly one of the only out lesbians there at the time, records two self-titled albums: one for the CBC in 1970 and one the next year with some of the top players in Canada, including guitarist Lenny Breau, and recorded by future Rush producer Terry Brown. Does some session work, including with Bruce Cockburn in 1980-81 (among other things, on the phenomenal "Tokyo," one of the greatest singles by Cockburn—or anyone), and lands a 25-year gig on Mr. Dressup. Moves to the woods near Huntsville, Ontario, in the 1980s, discovers early computer music software and releases Keyboard Fantasies in 1986, selling only 50 copies on cassette. Lived a life of obscurity for decades, identified as trans in 2002, and through a weird fluke and Japanese interest in Keyboard Fantasies, ended up becoming a minor underground sensation in the late 2010s, sparking a documentary, tributes, and international gigs and press. That all leads to this career-spanning compilation. 

Among others, a really lovely long-form profile ran in the New Republic.

Before Copeland's renaissance, I was aware of the name, if only because I'm the kind of nerd who reads Bruce Cockburn liner notes. I inherited a bunch of '70s vinyl years ago from a family friend, which included Copeland's second album. It didn't do anything for me when I got it, nor when I revisited it over the years: it's lovely but very earnest folk-jazz that I pegged as a post-Yorkville curiosity. Likewise, when Keyboard Fantasies was first re-released, I listened and heard only the kind of '80s new age that seemed oddly in vogue with people 20 years younger than me, and I was mystified. For all I knew, which was not much, this story could be the new "Lewis"—and if you know that somewhat regrettable obscure Canadian reference, more power to you. As Copeland's profile increased, I didn't pay much attention.

This brief yet comprehensive compilation, however, is a game-changer, and the strongest testament yet as to why Copeland deserves to be heard. First, is the voice: rich with operatic gospel tones, seemingly effortless and never show-offy. It's such a beautiful and warm instrument. With that comes a sheer force of personality that carries the listener through those Joni-esque early folk recordings to the lilting '80s synth lullabies of "Ever New" to the trip-hop of opening track "La Vita" to more recent recordings, including a rousing singalong version of "Deep River" recorded in the Netherlands.

That's why this compilation works so well: by spanning such a broad stretch of time, the track list's musical diversity reveals a complete portrait of a complex artist. Whereas certain albums sound dated as a whole, individual tracks illuminate steps in a journey (and I now love the two tracks here from Keyboard Fantasies). Without this curatorial vision, would I ever have become enraptured by the world of Beverly Glenn-Copeland? Possibly, if I had the chance to see him perform live, or finally got around to watching the doc (which I haven't yet). But this comp is revelatory and endlessly rewarding.  

This week, the Polaris Heritage Music Prize inducted three records: Buffy Sainte-Marie's It's My Way, Main Source's Breaking Atoms—both selected by a jury of critics—and Keyboard Fantasies, which won the public vote. All three choices seem rooted in a deliberate attempt to broaden the Canadian canon, which thrills me to no end (I say this having been a founding juror in 2015, when I considered it part of the mandate). But I'm always skeptical of public votes on prizes, because it's all too easy for an artist's fan base to vote early and vote often, so depending on the rabidity of the fan base (Rush) and the hustle chutzpah of the artist (Peaches), it can be relatively easy to win (not that either of those two didn't deserve it; they did).

But how the hell did Beverly Glenn-Copeland win the public vote? There's no marketing machine there. It's not a nostalgic favourite; the album only became widely available relatively recently—an album, I'll remind you, that only sold 50 copies the first time around. And finally, two years ago the number of people who knew his name probably numbered in the low hundreds. From total obscurity to winning a public vote previously won by Neil Young, Arcade Fire and Alanis Morrisette—that's quite a leap.

It says a lot that this music, this man, strikes such a chord right here, right now, with healing music in a world of pain. 

Runners-up for best 2020 reissue:

Prince – Sign O the Times (Warner). I mean, come on. On the one hand, it presents a good argument for record company interference: the 1987 double album is flawless; a triple album would not have been. But the "fat" sure is fascinating, even if we've already heard the best tracks trickle out over the years (and the mythical Miles Davis collab is not one of them).

Pylon – Box (New West). I'm not a big enough fan that the B-sides and early demos mean a lot to me, but the fact that the first two records, from 1980 and 1981—the missing link between the B-52s and R.E.M. in the lore of Athens, Ga.—are once again widely available is thrilling enough. The band that once blew away Gang of Four and turned down a tour with early U2 can now once again prove what all the fuss was about. Still pinching myself over the fact that I got to see the Pylon Re-Enactment Society perform at a street festival in Athens last year, a teenage dream come true. Only question: where is 1990's Chain, the record they made after R.E.M. lured them out of retirement?

Prince - Anthology; Piano and a Microphone 1983

Prince – Piano and a Microphone 1983 (Warner)

After the shock of Prince’s death in April 2016—as well as the surprise that he didn’t have a will, and the future of his estate was in question—speculation turned to what might be in his legendary vault. It’s a literal vault, in the basement of his studio/residence/entertainment complex Paisley Park, filled with more than 8,000 tapes of music made by the notorious workaholic over the span of 35 years.

Two-and-a-half years later, the first release from the vault is this intimate tape which is exactly as advertised: Prince, alone at a piano, in a studio in a basement “family room” (according to engineer Don Batts) for 34 minutes, working out new songs, reinterpreting a song from his last album (“International Lover,” from “1999”), and covering Joni Mitchell and an old gospel song. There’s nothing polished about occasionally hissy demo tape: this is just Prince playing around, for his own pleasure.

And yet: my God. We already know a lot about his genius as a guitarist, a singer, a songwriter, a producer and arranger. Here we see his piano skills to be pretty much the equal of his other skills (okay, maybe not guitar), and hearing his voice in all its multi-octave, expressive glory against such a stark backdrop is also revelatory.

There are only a few complete songs here, including an incredible Nina Simone-style sketch of “17 Days,” a song that would be the B-side for “When Doves Cry” the following year. We hear “Strange Relationship” four years before he recorded a full-band funk version for “Sign O the Times.” There’s a snippet of “Purple Rain” that bleeds into an equally brief turn on Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” where his jazzy chord voicings are just as interesting but different from Mitchell’s originals. He beatboxes on “International Lover.” And there are three songs that have never surfaced on any official release.

When he died, Prince had returned to this format, on an acclaimed tour also called Piano and a Microphone. No doubt there are great tapes from that as well. But to hear him in 1983, right before Purple Rain made him one of the biggest stars in the world, is an astonishing document that even the most casual Prince fan will find thrilling. All those deluxe reissues of music we’ve already heard can wait, as long as the vault is full of stuff like this. (Sept. 23)

Stream: “17 Days,” “Wednesday,” “Mary Don’t You Weep”

Prince – Anthology 1995-2010 (Sony)

When Prince died in 2016, no one wanted to hear this music. The Prince we want to remember is the hitmaker and innovator that ruled the 1980s, from roughly 1980 to 1992. The way his narrative is understood, Prince then lost his way in battles with record companies and changing musical trends, fighting back by releasing as much music as possible—sometimes four albums in a single year. Even diehard fans had trouble keeping up and wading through his output.

Which is a shame. Prince being the indisputable musical genius he is—as a singer, a guitarist, songwriter, producer, arranger, bandleader—of course there are dozens of tracks from that time that rival his greatest work. Prince being Prince, though, means that the casual fan would have to wade through a lot—and we’re talking about *a lot*—of material to find the golden needles in the haystack. Most didn’t bother. (I'm guilty as charged.)

For the first 15 years of his career, Prince recorded for Warner Brothers, the execs at which gave the prolific artist a very long leash—but not long enough for the man who, after his death, left a literal vault of unreleased music that it will likely take decades for musicologists to wade through. Being on Warner meant that the public was only tasting the cream. In the early ’90s, as Prince became more disenchanted with his label, the albums started to get more bloated: the one named after his unpronounceable androgynous symbol had some of his finest hits (“7,” “My Name is Prince”) along with some of his worst dreck. It was a pattern that plagued the rest of his career.

When Prince started declaring himself a “slave” and demanding “emancipation,” all bets were off. His music from 1995 onward flowed directly from his id, for better or worse. He wasn’t going to make it easy for us. We had to accept the whole package deal if we were still on board.

Full disclosure: I’m a massive fan of Prince’s first 10 albums, which are almost flawless (let’s not talk about Batman). I remained faithful through all the ’90s, including the Emancipation period, and then fell off completely in the 2000s. He released 11 records that decade, with varying degrees of distribution, some of which I don’t ever remember even hearing about (2004’s Slaughterhouse? 2009’s MPLSound? Anyone?). Ideally, this kind of compilation should be a godsend.

It’s not. It’s just as messy as any Prince album of the period in question.

Yes, there are unquestionable, underappreciated classics like the 2006 single “Black Sweat,” which deserves to be on any list of Prince’s greatest tracks. It gathers up fun throwaways like the 2007 rock song where he declares that, “I love you, baby, but not like I love my guitar.” It collects some stunning R&B ballads like “Crucial,” which was bumped from 1987’s Sign O the Times for “Adore,” or 2007’s “Somewhere Here on Earth.” It rescues two tracks from 1996’s Chaos and Disorder,  Prince’s last proper record released under his Warner contract; the title track is perhaps his most underrated rock song. There are some fine funk tracks from later years, including “Northside” (2004), “Chelsea Rodgers” (2007) and “Ol’ Skool Company” (2009).

But—even for me, someone who didn’t pay a lot of attention to this material at the time—it’s obvious there are some questionable calls. There are six songs from 1995’s The Gold Experience,  a single-disc album that spawned one hit single—and that song, “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World,” is not even on here, due to ongoing licensing issues (it was his first post-Warner hit, licensed to various labels at the time). Two of those Gold Experience songs include Prince at his most self-parodic (“P. Control”) and an unusually vindictive and uncharacteristic dip into misogyny (“Eye Hate U”). Who wants to hear those again? Compare that to the three-disc 1996 album Emancipation,  which only gets two songs on this compilation. Emancipation was a bloated mess, yes (let’s leave “Www.Emale.Com” in the dustbin of time), but it’s exactly the kind of album that needs to be redeemed by some selective editing—six more great songs from that album could easily replace some of the space-filler found here. Anthology would benefit from "Face Down," for starters:

There are some helpful reminders sprinkled throughout, however, of brilliance that was relegated to fan-only releases. Most people have never heard the all-acoustic album The Truth, which was packaged with 1998’s mail-order-only Crystal Ball. Because—well, why would you, unless you’re a complete Prince fanatic? Likewise, excerpts from the One Night Alone album (and the follow-up triple live album, which is stunning), featuring mostly just Prince at the piano, deserve a much wider audience than they had. There’s even one of the four 14-minute jazz suites that comprised 2003’s N.E.W.S., which is much better than you think it’s going to be, as is the track from the similar jazz instrumental album Xpectation, from the same year (and both are better than anything on 2001’s The Rainbow Children, which is also represented here thrice).

If the point of Anthology was to whittle out the excess, it fails dramatically. Fans are left to wade through the original albums yet again—although at least that’s easier to do, now that they’re all available for streaming. The best that can be said about Anthology is that it points fans in various directions, but it is by no means a destination. (Aug. 24)

Stream: “Black Sweat,” “Chelsea Rodgers,” “Guitar”

Beatles vs. Prince: reissues of decade-defining albums

Still cleaning up some 2017 reviews here, including these from last summer: reissues of albums that defined their respective decades. One was much more revelatory than the other.

The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (EMI)

It’s 2017. Why are we talking about Sgt. Pepper’s? In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Beatles’ most acclaimed album turned 50 on June 1. Which meant yet another occasion to trot out the tired cliché that it is somehow the single greatest album of the rock era—even if, as many fans have pointed out for years, it’s not even the best Beatles record.

The marketing ploy clearly works: It’s the third bestselling album ever in Britain, behind only greatest hits collections by ABBA and Queen. And it returned to the charts this week, selling more than 100,000 copies in the U.S. and U.K. in the past seven days. Who’s still buying this album?

For all the praise that continues to be heaped upon it, there is much to blame Sgt. Pepper’s for. For starters, there’s the notion that it is somehow a “concept album”—despite the fact there is absolutely no musical or lyrical coherence to the 13 songs here, and anyone who tells you otherwise is clearly grasping at straws (or really, really high). Since Sgt. Pepper’s, music critics have been trying to bestow undue significance on no end of albums that merely sound important, from Dark Side of the Moon to OK Computer to Funeral. And for better and worse, it gave countless rock bands the idea that strings, brass and exotic instruments instantly make you seem like a better band than you actually are.

The legacy and the legend are problematic, and should be ignored in favour of the sheer pleasure of actually listening to it. Sgt. Pepper’s is, of course, a great album. The question is: do you need to buy it again?

Of course it’s been remastered yet again, and for those who notice subtle differences, yes, it sounds great. For those same fans who study the studio notes to discover recording minutiae, it might be somewhat interesting to hear the alternate takes, instrumental versions, and unadorned basic tracks that peel back the curtain on the making of what we’re told is a masterpiece. It is admittedly interesting to hear, without the string section, the 24-bar dissonant transition between the two sections of “A Day in the Life” (and the one leading to the final chord). But overall they’re really dragging the ditch here: anything that didn’t already surface on 1995’s Anthology is likely not worth your time. (June 8, 2017)

Stream: “Strawberry Fields Forever (Take 26),” “A Day in the Life (Take 1 with Hummed Chord),” “Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band Reprise (Take 8)”

Prince and the Revolution – Purple Rain: Deluxe Edition (Warner)

The Vault is open. Yes, Vault with a capital V, long a source of wonderment among Prince fans for what be held in an actual vault inside his Paisley Park complex, which apparently holds enough outtakes that it will take decades for archivists to wade through them. Glimpses into the Vault have been rare: some tracks surfaced on his online-only fan club release Crystal Ball in 1998; he also released a subpar contractual fulfillment album called The Vault in 1999.

But this is the gold mine: unreleased material and outtakes from the Purple Rain sessions, right in the middle of an astounding five years of creative output (1982-87) that rivals only the Beatles. The reason none of this surfaced at the time was that Prince had already moved on, recording almost any day he wasn’t on the road (or shooting a movie). So here we have unreleased pop throwaways like “Velvet Kitty Kat” (not to be confused with, um, “Scarlet Pussy”), showcases for Revolution members Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman (“Our Destiny”), and falsetto ballads that rival “The Beautiful Ones” (“Electric Intercourse”). Then there are repurposed takes on songs we already know, but drastically different and worth the attention of even the most casual fan: there’s a 12-minute version of “Computer Blue” with some of the best guitar sounds Prince (and/or Wendy) ever put to tape, or the piano and synth version of “Father’s Song,” which was repurposed for the outro of “Computer Blue.” Then there’s “We Can F—k,” a track he worked on for seven years before a very different version emerged on 1990’s Graffiti Bridge, featuring George Clinton. Or extended funk workouts like “The Dance Electric” or “Possessed,” which, as usually the case with Prince, are light years ahead of tracks that most ’80s R&B and pop acts would release as lead singles.

You’d be forgiven this was a total posthumous cash grab from his label and estate. It’s not. The artist who once shaved the word “slave” on his face signed a new deal with Warner in 2014 in which he regained ownership of all his recordings for the label; Prince oversaw this project before his death last April. Which is obvious once you hear the attention to detail in bringing these tracks to life; hissy cassette dubs had circulated for years among fans, but everything here is pristine and perfect. And even if you think you never need to hear the Purple Rain album proper again, this is one of the rare remastering jobs that warrants attention. (Unlike, say, [cough] Sgt. Pepper’s.)

A “deluxe expanded” edition includes the well-known B-sides (“Erotic City,” “17 Day” and more) and extended mixes (like the version of “Let’s Go Crazy” that appears in the film) as well as the considerably more superfluous “single edits” of the album’s most popular songs. It also tacks on a long-bootlegged full-length live show from 1985 in Syracuse, N.Y.

Not enough? Rest assured there’s still enough in the Vault to warrant some kind of five-disc 40^th-anniversary Super Mondo Extra Deluxe version in 2024. And it will probably be just as great. (July 6, 2017)

Stream: “Computer Blue (Hallway Speech version),” “Father’s Song,” “Our Destiny/Roadhouse Garden”

Prince – HitNRun Phase Two

Prince – HitNRun Phase Two (Universal)

Prince is dead. Long live Prince.

(My obit, written for Maclean’s, is here.)

The final album from His Purpleness debuted on the streaming service Tidal in January, and got an official release a week after his death. This is no Blackstar, which was David Bowie’s final masterpiece, recorded while he knew he had a terminal cancer diagnosis and intended to be a final artistic statement; indeed, Bowie died three days after its release in January. HitNRun Phase Two, on the other hand, is just another day at the office for Prince. This is who Prince was at the end of his life: his innovative and weirder days long behind him, a man comfortable in his own skin who just wants to write some new jams that pay ode to the jazz, rock and soul he grew up on. It’s Prince on autopilot—which for the most part is still good enough to take most modern icons to school. His guitar skills, his acrobatic vocals, his distinctive harmony arrangements, inviting his potential lovers to take a bath with him—here are all the trademarks that remained constant no matter what sonic skin he inhabited.

But because this is Prince, our standards are understandably high. So when he tosses off a rote rocker called “Screwdriver” (chorus lyric: “I’m your driver, you’re my screw”)—that song has been floating around for three years now, and should have been left alone—or attempts a lame come-on like “We’ve got groovy potential,” it’s more than obvious the legend is phoning it in. One of the better tracks, “Xtraloveable,” dates back to a demo from the early 1980s.

The album opens with “Baltimore,” a song written, recorded and released in May 2015 after the death of that city’s Freddie Gray in police custody, eight months after the shooting of Michael Brown in St. Louis sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. Prince was never much for politics (“You say you want a leader / but you can’t seem to make up your mind,” he sang in “Purple Rain”), outside the apocalyptic nuclear paranoia that underscored his earliest work (“1999,” “Ronnie Talk to Russia”). At the beginning of his career, he deliberately instructed his record company to portray him as mixed race and not to market him as “black,” which was encoded in Purple Rain, where his fictional mother was Italian. But in the last year of his life, Prince was a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter, playing a free concert in Baltimore after the riots, and then this song appeared: explicitly name-checking Gray and Brown, the video featuring footage of protests.

What’s odd is that the song itself is anything but a fiery protest song, or even a lament like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”—or indeed, Prince’s own “Sign O the Times.” Instead, it’s an upbeat, gospel-tinged pop song with a string section and lyrics like, “We’re tired of the cryin’ and people dyin’ let’s take all the guns away.” If you weren’t paying attention, you might mistake it for an unusually good civic tourism jingle.

Prince confounded all of us—even his hardcore fans—throughout his career, so it’s not the least bit surprising that he did so right up to the end. More telling than his final album will be what makes its way out of his vault in the years to come. (April 28)

Stream: “Baltimore,” “Stare,” “Xtraloveable”