Ed Askew: the last songs, finished by friends

The Final Painting is a last record, and it behaves like one. Nine songs, just under thirty-seven minutes, Ed Askew singing at home in the years when his health had already taken touring off the table, while other musicians sent their parts in from their own rooms and from a studio in Nashville. Nothing here is loud, and nothing here asks for sympathy. It is a hushed album made by a man near the end, and it holds itself together better than most records made by people sitting in the same room at the same time.

Askew was born in Stamford, Connecticut, on December 1, 1940, and studied painting at Yale. He was 26, out of art school and facing the draft, when he started writing songs instead. By 1968 he had a self-titled LP on ESP-Disk', the New York label that released it, and the record is known today as Ask the Unicorn. A second album went unreleased. He went home to Connecticut, taught art, painted houses and kept writing, then moved back to New York and started passing around cassettes of songs he had recorded himself. Records kept coming: Little Eyes, his lost second album, eventually surfaced on De Stijl, and in 2013 DeCicca produced For the World, with Sharon Van Etten, Marc Ribot, Mary Lattimore and Eve Searls on it. Askew died on January 4, 2025. He was 84.

This one started with a phone call. In 2022 DeCicca rang Askew to tell him how good the songs were, and the two of them worked out a plan. Askew sent nearly three dozen songs in various stages of completion. Health scares on both sides pushed everything to early 2024, when musicians recorded their parts either at home or in a Nashville studio. Trevor Nikrant recorded and mixed at the Golden Tone Zone, with Nikrant's Styrofoam Winos and Ryan Davis's Roadhouse Band taking their turns almost in answer to one another. Askew recorded his own parts himself, at home. Nine songs made it.

The sound is spare and it stays spare. Askew plays keyboards, synth and harmonica, and the album's few extra colours, trumpet and tenor saxophone among them, arrive like weather rather than arrangement. It is dreamy in the way late work can be dreamy, elegiac without insisting on it, and lonely in a plain way that never performs itself. The mood holds from the first minute to the last, and the record never once raises its temperature.

Winter Song opens and sets the season in its title. Bacon & Eggs follows, nearly five minutes, the longest thing here and the one place the album lets itself stretch. Long Night brings in Eve Searls on backing vocals. Gray Air-O-Plane does the same for Sharon Van Etten. Someone gives three minutes and change to Bill Callahan, the shortest track on the record. Nightingale ends it with Searls again. Between them sit Lost in the Kitchen, A Train Is a Thought and Tough Guys, titles that read like the pieces of an ordinary day. The concerns are the ones the album keeps returning to: a long life looked at directly, the self-portrait as a working method, an artist's late light, and the stubborn do-it-yourself habit that goes back to those cassettes.

It is for the people who already keep an Askew record on the shelf, and for anyone who plays For the World when the year gets long. It sits close to the quiet end of Bill Callahan's own catalogue, and near the Incredible String Band at their least busy, with far less decoration than either. Play it in the evening, low, straight through, no skipping. It will not survive as background.

Nine songs out of nearly three dozen is a severe edit, and the record shows it. The guests are scattered rather than built: Searls at three and again at nine, Van Etten at six, Callahan at seven, so the best known names arrive as visits rather than as parts of a design. The hush never breaks either. Through Lost in the Kitchen and A Train Is a Thought the pace flattens, and a record this short starts to feel like more.

That is the cost of making an album this way: in pieces, across two years and two cities, with nobody in the room to say the tempo should move. What it buys is Someone, Callahan's voice low under Askew's for three minutes, and Nightingale, which hands the last word to a harmony instead of to the man himself. The Final Painting is a 4: strong, earned, and clearly the record its maker wanted. Put it on once, properly, and you will put it on again.

The tracklist

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