Keyboard Fantasies (stylized as ...Keyboard Fantasies...) is the third studio album by Canadian musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland, self-released on Atlast Records as a cassette in 1986, a time when Glenn-Copeland was best known for his children's television music. The album was inspired by the nature and environment of his home in Huntsville, Ontario, including the surrounding lakes and woods. Recorded using only a Yamaha DX7 and Roland TR-707 drum machine, the musician felt he was able to musically display the feelings that the environment gave him accurately. He felt the entirely electronic instrumentation he used was comparable to an orchestra because of the range of sounds he could create.
The album is considered to be an electronic new age album, with pensive, relaxing music and comforting vocals. Upon release, Keyboard Fantasies only sold several copies, but soon grew a reputation among audiophiles as an overlooked, pioneering electronic work. A Japanese fan known in audiophile circles contacted Glenn-Copeland to send him copies of the album in 2015 which he then sold. This helped rise the album's popularity, and soon Glenn-Copeland received offers from record labels hoping to re-release the album. Remastered and reissued on vinyl by Canadian labels Invisible City Editions and Seance Centre in 2017, the album became popular among a new generation of listeners, for whom Glenn-Copeland began performing the album live.
Background and production
Beverly Glenn-Copeland, born in Philadelphia but raised in Canada, worked for many years composing music for children's television, including Sesame Street. His songwriting and performing credits for children's shows also included Shining Time Station and Mr. Dressup, but he also released his own music in the meantime. This pattern was the musician's regimen for almost three decades, and he would also chant each day at home and weekly within his Buddhist group. It was during this prolonged period that he created Keyboard Fantasies in 1986, a time when he was living in Huntsville, Canada. The album was heavily inspired by the serene environment he was living in, including the surrounding woods and lakes, which he says he can "hear" in the music. He felt the album features an "innocence that was part of my experience at the time." The need to make Keyboard Fantasies was also partly born from how writing children's music restricted the musician from making "personal statements."
Recorded at Audio-Logic Recording Studio, Huntsville, Ontario, with engineering and mixing work from Collen Veitch, Keyboard Fantasies was written on and performed entirely using a Yamaha DX7 and Roland TR-707 drum machine. Although Glenn-Copeland had discovered computers some five years beforehand, he was "waiting for them to be able to help me with music," as he later commented. He felt they were finally able to do so for the production of the album. He said the electronic instruments gave him a pallet that he felt "was essentially for me an orchestra", saying: "It allowed me to write everything I was hearing. I don't just hear melody and harmony. I hear all kinds of other lines. 'This is a cello part, this is for the horns.' It was the closest I could come and I was ecstatic and slept only three hours a night, spent all of my time in my studio going nuts." Glenn-Copeland later described himself as being in an "elevated state" during recording, and reflected that, upon hearing the album, "what I felt was that what I was listening to was these woods, and to my reaction to this environment."