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 (\u201cEd the Great!\u201d; \u201cpure gold\u201d) and you begin to understand the passion that Ed Askew \u2013 an under-the-radar US poet, artist and musician \u2013 has inspired over the years.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was living in a world that was for people who didn\u2019t fit in,\u201d Askew\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Its producer, DeCicca, first fell for what he calls Askew\u2019s \u201csingularity\u201d in the early 00s. But in recent years, he has captured the hearts of many more of music\u2019s 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\u2019s Cafe Oto in 2017, and indie-Americana singer-songwriter Steve Gunn, who accompanied him at gigs in the early 2010s. \u201cI got to tour with him in 2011 and felt his Jesus-y vibes,\u201d Callahan says. \u201cJesus with a little scamp mixed in.\u201d For Callahan, there is a \u201cprimordial\u201d element in Askew\u2019s music, that \u201cmakes it feel like the world is evolving right before your eyes when his song is playing. There\u2019s a holy aspect to it \u2013 those piano chords constructed like sheets of diamond ice.\u201d<\/p>\n
From the scent of a marigold to the death of a Kennedy, what stands out the most about Askew\u2019s songwriting is his fl\u00e2neur-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 C\u00e9zanne \u2013 an artist he greatly admired \u2013 or the writing of Joe Brainard mixed with the poetry of Lorca, than it does any of its musical equivalents.<\/p>\n
Unconcerned with commercial success \u2026 Ed Askew, date unknown.<\/p>\n
Askew\u2019s song Moon in the Mind appeared on the soundtrack of Netflix\u2019s 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\u2019t concerned with acclaim or commerciality. \u201cHe just wasn\u2019t wired that way,\u201d DeCicca says; instead, Askew simply focused on writing his fine-spun songs on a day-to-day basis.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cbasket house\u201d 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 \u2013 usually more inclined towards free jazz giants such as Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders \u2013 who put out his 1968 self-titled debut (later retitled Ask the Unicorn), but soon shelved his follow-up Little Eyes, which wasn\u2019t released until 2002.<\/p>\n
\u2018I play music for you to feel\u2019 \u2026 Performing in K\u00f6ln in 2013. Photograph: Ullstein Bild\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Over the course of his life, Askew put out approximately 50 albums between labels, archival releases, live albums and self-releases, \u201cwith more still unreleased in his vault\u201d, 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 \u2013 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\u2019re calling out numbers: \u201c16\u201d, \u201c22\u201d and \u201c46\u201d are delivered by Callahan with his usual deadpan delivery. \u201cI think if most people wrote a song like that it would be about their agitation but Ed\u2019s point of view is so different,\u201d DeCicca says. But who knows if it\u2019s really about social security at all, such is the impressionistic nature of Askew\u2019s lyric writing.<\/p>\n
Jay Pluck, Askew\u2019s close friend and collaborator, points out just how pioneering Askew\u2019s psych-folk songwriting was in the 1960s. \u201cIt was quite brave for him to be writing openly gay love songs so early on,\u201d he tells me. And yet: \u201cOver the years, I noticed that no one really knew that he was gay and I don\u2019t know why \u2013 there are gay love songs on Ask the Unicorn and Little Eyes.\u201d Pluck mentions a later song called Lamar, recorded on cassette tape in the late-90s, in which Askew is \u201cprofessing his love in a Greek paean kind of way\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u2018A true artist\u2019 \u2026 Ed Askew. Photograph: Christian Filardo<\/p>\n
Would Askew have described himself as a gay songwriter, I wonder? \u201cI think he would,\u201d Pluck answers \u2013 before pausing. \u201cAlthough he could be a contrarian. If you asked him if he thought he was a great gay artist, he\u2019d say no. But if you left off \u2018gay\u2019 he\u2019d be like, why?\u201d Pluck laughs. For Askew, his sexuality was simply who he was, as much a part of his songs as anything else.<\/p>\n
Yet for Askew, \u201clike most obscure musicians, there was never that Searching for Sugar Man blast,\u201d DeCicca says, citing the 2012 documentary that launched Mexican-American musician Rodr\u00edguez out of obscurity and into late-in-life fame. \u201cWhat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a slow-burn tale in the age of the algorithm, and a fitting one for a musician who lived life on his own terms: \u201cI play music for you to feel,\u201d he once sang.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no trying in his music,\u201d Callahan says. \u201cIt just is.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Final Painting is released 31 July on Drag City<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a grainy television clip from 1986, a flame-haired and neckerchiefed troubadour plucks away at a lute-like instrument,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":703448,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-703447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}