A final album from Ed Askew is on the way. The Final Painting, the late outsider songwriter, painter and poet’s posthumous album, arrives on July 31st via Drag City — assembled in the last years of his life with producer Jerry David DeCicca, who previously worked with Ed on 2013’s For the World. The first single, Gray Air-o-Plane, is out today with an accompanying music video (watch below).
Ed died in January 2025 at the age of 84, leaving a singular catalogue that stretched from his 1968 ESP-Disk debut Ask the Unicorn through to a remarkable late-period flowering of Bandcamp uploads, taped in his Brooklyn apartment as his health declined and touring became impossible. It was there that DeCicca first heard the new songs and reached out about a record. Ed responded by sending nearly three dozen tracks in various stages of completion, and the pair began plotting a path forward.
Gray Air-o-Plane opens that conversation with the seasoned delivery of an old poet. “What do I care about / in the blue sky? And after a lifetime of love / why do I cry?” Ed sings, his vocal fallibility carrying the song’s intimacy. DeCicca surrounds him with guitar loops, conga, tenor saxophone, and the backing vocals of Sharon Van Etten — a longtime collaborator and admirer. The Jake Housh-assembled video frames the song with Ed’s own paintings, depicting a city coated in nightfall.
The wider album draws past collaborators Eve Searls and Canaan Faulkner back into the fold alongside Van Etten, with new guests Bill Callahan, William Tyler, Ryan Jewell, Dustin Laurenzi, Fulvio Sigurta and Trevor Nikrant (Styrofoam Winos, Ryan Davis’s Roadhouse Band). It is, as the press materials put it, a wondrous variation on the intimacy of the self-portrait — one last brushstroke from an artist whose body of work, as Thomas Blake (who also penned a poem in his memory) wrote in his review of London, seemed to expand in different directions right up to the end.
The Final Painting is out on July 31st on Drag City
Pre-Order: https://lnk.to/finalpainting