Delightful, charming, old-fashioned, touching, tender and timeless, this late-career LP from from 82-year-old American-born Canadian singer alongside partner Elizabeth is a love letter to their companionship, and an embrace of the inevitable. Copeland’s high, gentle voice remains distinctive, delicately controlled and rather beautiful - and as a self-declared trans man it has a warm, wonderful, gender ambiguity. The pathos and tenderness of these songs is in part coloured by him having a form of dementia known as LATE, and some slight cognitive impairment. Elizabeth, who first saw met Beverley perform in 1990s then met and fell in love with him in 2007, is a guiding hand and producer and sometimes joins on duo vocals, though with accompanying piano, choir and occasional clarinet, that special, subtle warble of voice and skill deliver with emotion and precision remains undimed. Highlights include the opener (and former Song of the Day) Let Us Dance (Movement One) - “the wind blows on the hillside … this road we are on, let us dance down the road”; the poetic title track, duetting with Elizabeth (“Glistening waters / Loons with their waltz on the lake / Love with each breath that I take / Here with you”); Children’s Anthem, another duet, which also looks forward in time, and feels like it could have been sung a century ago with piano and accompaniment in a house parlour with tea (and imagines how children “will travel to a future you and I will never see”); and particularly vocally strong, is the love song Harbour (“You're my harbour, my rainbow / My promise of tomorrow / And my heart aches when your tears flow / But then spring breaks, and that's all I know”). Middle Island Lament meanwhile comes with some striking whistle accompaniment, while from start to finish all the way to closer Let Us Dance (Movement Two), much of the album was recorded in a single take, with a precision, simplicity and some gentle improvisation. Magical. Out on Transgressive Records.
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