In a grainy television clip from 1986, a flame-haired and neckerchiefed troubadour plucks away at a lute-like instrument, harmonica under chin, the gentle ripples giving way to a voice full of longing. This performance, uploaded to YouTube in 2010, has generated only a handful of comments, but peruse any of them (“Ed the Great!”; “pure gold”) and you begin to understand the passion that Ed Askew – an under-the-radar US poet, artist and musician – has inspired over the years.
“He was living in a world that was for people who didn’t fit in,” Askew’s collaborator, Jerry David DeCicca, says on the free-spiritedness of his friend, whose musical life began with discovering the 10-stringed tiple as a teenager in the 1950s and ended with his death a year ago, aged 84, on the verge of him releasing his album The Final Painting, now being released posthumously this month.
A Singular Talent
Its producer, DeCicca, first fell for what he calls Askew’s “singularity” in the early 00s. But in recent years, he has captured the hearts of many more of music’s most characterful contemporary acts: from Sharon Van Etten and Bill Callahan, both of whom lend their vocals to The Final Painting, to Glasgow psych-folk band Trembling Bells who brought Askew to London’s Cafe Oto in 2017, and indie-Americana singer-songwriter Steve Gunn, who accompanied him at gigs in the early 2010s. “I got to tour with him in 2011 and felt his Jesus-y vibes,” Callahan says. “Jesus with a little scamp mixed in.” For Callahan, there is a “primordial” element in Askew’s music, that “makes it feel like the world is evolving right before your eyes when his song is playing. There’s a holy aspect to it – those piano chords constructed like sheets of diamond ice.”
Flâneur Observations
From the scent of a marigold to the death of a Kennedy, what stands out the most about Askew’s songwriting is his flâneur-like observations, evoking the quotidian and the tremendous. In 2011, Askew cited his early influences as Kurt Weill, John Cage and Erik Satie, while others have tried to compare Askew to the likes of Robert Wyatt, Gaslight-era Bob Dylan or the Incredible String Band. The truth is that his baroque songwriting bears more resemblance to the multiple-angled paintings of Cézanne – an artist he greatly admired – or the writing of Joe Brainard mixed with the poetry of Lorca, than it does any of its musical equivalents.
Askew’s song Moon in the Mind appeared on the soundtrack of Netflix’s smash-hit series Baby Reindeer in 2024, an inclusion that was welcome and unexpected in the last year of his life, DeCicca says. But for the most part, Askew wasn’t concerned with acclaim or commerciality. “He just wasn’t wired that way,” DeCicca says; instead, Askew simply focused on writing his fine-spun songs on a day-to-day basis.
Early Life and Career
He displayed that beatnik essence from the very beginning. Born in Connecticut in 1940, Askew studied painting at Yale School of Art in the early 1960s, before moving to New York for a brief spell, playing for tips in the “basket house” folk music venues of the East Village in 1967. It was here that he attracted the attention of New York-based record company ESP-Disk – usually more inclined towards free jazz giants such as Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders – who put out his 1968 self-titled debut (later retitled Ask the Unicorn), but soon shelved his follow-up Little Eyes, which wasn’t released until 2002.
Over the course of his life, Askew put out approximately 50 albums between labels, archival releases, live albums and self-releases, “with more still unreleased in his vault”, says DeCicca. This was mostly a home-recorded and self-published enterprise funded by house painting and art teaching, plus welfare assistance for a time – before he returned to the studio in 2011. Regarding a song on the new record titled Someone, with Callahan on vocals, DeCicca wonders if Askew is waiting in a social security office while they’re calling out numbers: “16”, “22” and “46” are delivered by Callahan with his usual deadpan delivery. “I think if most people wrote a song like that it would be about their agitation but Ed’s point of view is so different,” DeCicca says. But who knows if it’s really about social security at all, such is the impressionistic nature of Askew’s lyric writing.
Pioneering Gay Love Songs
Jay Pluck, Askew’s close friend and collaborator, points out just how pioneering Askew’s psych-folk songwriting was in the 1960s. “It was quite brave for him to be writing openly gay love songs so early on,” he tells me. And yet: “Over the years, I noticed that no one really knew that he was gay and I don’t know why – there are gay love songs on Ask the Unicorn and Little Eyes.” Pluck mentions a later song called Lamar, recorded on cassette tape in the late-90s, in which Askew is “professing his love in a Greek paean kind of way”.
Would Askew have described himself as a gay songwriter, I wonder? “I think he would,” Pluck answers – before pausing. “Although he could be a contrarian. If you asked him if he thought he was a great gay artist, he’d say no. But if you left off ‘gay’ he’d be like, why?” Pluck laughs. For Askew, his sexuality was simply who he was, as much a part of his songs as anything else.
A Slow-Burn Legacy
Yet for Askew, “like most obscure musicians, there was never that Searching for Sugar Man blast,” DeCicca says, citing the 2012 documentary that launched Mexican-American musician Rodríguez out of obscurity and into late-in-life fame. “What allowed Ed to gradually find a global audience was not one event shining a spotlight; it was that he lived, day in and day out, as a true artist, sharing meaningful breadcrumbs for more and more people to discover.”
It’s a slow-burn tale in the age of the algorithm, and a fitting one for a musician who lived life on his own terms: “I play music for you to feel,” he once sang.
“There is no trying in his music,” Callahan says. “It just is.” The Final Painting is released 31 July on Drag City.
