‘His chords are like sheets of diamond ice’: the beguiling psych-folk of late cult songwriter Ed Askew
Source: www.theguardian.com ·
Section: entertainment-sports ·
Bias: Center-Left
· Published: Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:00:43 GMT
The late songwriter released around 50 records, writing gay love songs and effortless folk songs from folk’s fringes. Fans including Bill Callahan explain his singular brillianceIn 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. Continue reading...
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