Before “Keyboard Fantasies,” Copeland had released two folk albums, but his main work was as a songwriter and performer on the Canadian children’s show “Mr. Dressup.” In a clip from around the same time that “Keyboard Fantasies” was released, Copeland, playing the head of a trading post in Mr. Dressup’s neighborhood, fishes out a birdlike puppet and sings it a song. It’s fascinating to think of him inhabiting two worlds simultaneously—performing songs for children and, in his spare hours, making complex and adventurous ambient music—but the two modes would each end up shaping Copeland’s quietly influential career. Since the nineteen-nineties, Copeland’s primary musical collaborator has been his life partner, Elizabeth, a writer and a performing artist. In recent decades, they have only sporadically released new music—“The Ones Ahead,” from 2023, was the first Copeland album issued under his own name after coming out as a trans man, in 2002. Now, on February 6th, the Copelands are releasing their latest album, “Laughter in Summer,” which comprises voice-and-piano reimaginings of past songs, many of them accompanied by choral arrangements.