I have a confession to make. I have a personal connection to the subject. I toured with Ed Askew and Mike Heron (Incredible String Band) with my former band, Trembling Bells, in the summer of 2017. It was pitched as a kind of Battle Royale for hippies where we’d all play on each other’s songs – the bong being passed from one generation to the next. We had a nickname for Ed – Colonel Sanders – because of his glasses, Van Dyke beard and rather goatish countenance. And because his songs were so finger-lickin ’ good.
His performance style had progressed from the tortured, tousle-haired troubadour of the 1960s outsider folk menagerie to something much more radiant and vast. His songs had a slow, elemental grandeur that were characterised by Jay Pluck’s rippling piano and Ed’s inimitable sprechgesang vocals and emotive harmonica. To be on stage with them was like performing at the centre of a cloud.
Ed’s new album – The Final Painting – has essentially been developed from a flotilla of songs that he uploaded to his Bandcamp page in the years after our tour. Longtime collaborator Jerry DeCiccia heard them and wanted to grow them in the presence of guest musicians including Sharon Van Etten, William Tyler and Bill Callahan. Various complications (lockdown, deteriorating health, the vagaries of remote recordings with an all-star band) have meant that the album has been released posthumously (Ed passed away in January 2025). This adds an extra dimension to the way you experience the material. It’s not that it imbues the work with a preternatural wisdom from the great beyond – it’s more the fragile poignance of a great artist in the December of his years, giving one last shake of his feathers before exiting the stage for the final time.
Opening track Winter Song rattles along with the anguish of someone entering God’s waiting room. Saxophone, organ and marching drums form a latticed backdrop for Askew’s existential fist-shaking “TV princess wears old clothes on the pretty TV show/ Asking questions we don’t know… we don’t know… we don’t know”. This is followed by the more sanguine Bacon & Eggs, which is a diaristic portrait of the artist’s observations while walking around his neighbourhood. It pulsates with the incidental miracles of everyday life, with Askew crooning “a young child and his dad, waiting for the bus… It’s been sunny all day/ The kid’s just got out of school/ Everybody’s running around”. Tough Guys starts out as a love letter to “A couple of tough guys/ Handsome boys” that Ed has side-eyed in a local bar and telescopes out to reminiscences of lovers past in reveries of mourning and romance: “They left like a mystery/ They left and kissed me”.
The final track, The Nightingale, is a delicate duet with Van Etten accompanied by hand percussion and spiralling saxophone. The song’s departing lyric is as spine-shivering as any Askew ever wrote: “Water runs upstream and the movie runs backwards/ As the nightingale sings, the movie runs backwards.”
The Final Painting occupies a space directly between David Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker – where the musical adventurousness of the former meets the lyrical sensuality of the latter. It documents the last creative gasp of a unique performer, not raging against the dying of the light, but dancing towards it with outstretched arms. The Colonel’s secret recipe remains a beautiful mystery right to the end.
The Final Painting (July 31st, 2026) Drag City