Bleu Edmondson was once one of the most promising stars in the Texas country scene, as well as the author of party anthems that still ring out on jukeboxes and college playlists across the Lone Star State. But in 2017, Edmondson all but walked away from music.
“I had to get inspired again,” he tells Rolling Stone on a late-August afternoon in the front room of Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, Texas.
A few feet away, Edmondson sees his name on the list of upcoming concerts at the venue. For the singer and Gruene Hall both, it’s been a while.
The business side, and the demands of independent touring, had left the singer-songwriter jaded, despite having a reliable fanbase and lifelong friendships with major Texas acts such as Randy Rogers and Wade Bowen. So, when he returned in summer 2025 with To the End, an expressive six-song EP that marked his first new music in a decade, Edmondson made the choice to open up the last few years of his life to fans and his Texas contemporaries.
“I finally put together enough words in a row that I liked and that I felt merited me putting them on tape,” Edmondson says. “There was no personal reason. Getting back on the road is the number 19 priority in my life. I don’t give a shit about that. But what I did want to do is keep writing. The writing is the fun part for me. The madness and the anxiety and everything else is what comes from running a business and being on tour, which is why I’m just dipping my toe in it.”
The result is a project unlike anything the Texas country genre has turned out in recent memory. Bowen produced To the End and oversaw the musicians backing Edmondson. That allowed Edmondson to focus on the music, cutting through the cynical feelings that had kept him away in the first place. From the very first line of the opening track, “King of the Dark,” he’s letting listeners know where his head has been. “They kicked me out on the street with my guitar in my hand/I got into a bind, and I turned into a man,” he sings.
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By the time he gets to the title track, he makes it clear, to himself and anyone who cares, that he’s at peace. “Red wine and Adderall got em thinkin’ they got it all/Well, I got you,” he sings to his wife, while also alluding to the vices of musicians trying to make it in Texas.
To the End started in one of Edmondson’s favorite places: Terlingua, Texas, a town near the Mexico border, not far from Big Bend National Park, that Jerry Jeff Walker celebrated on his 1973 live album Viva Terlingua. It’s home to the Original Terlingua International Championship Chili Cook Off, which, at one time, was one of the biggest music festivals in Texas. That was right around the time Edmondson released his 2001 debut, Southland, and its breakout anthem “Fifty Dollars and a Flask of Crown.” These days, though, Terlingua is Edmondson’s getaway.
“I built a place in Terlingua a few years ago — me and my wife did,” he says. “She fell in love with that high-desert thing and kind of romanticized it. Well, I bought it hook, line, and sinker, too. I thought, ‘Maybe I should go down there every now and again and see if I can pull out my notebooks.’ I’ve had these notebooks for 20 years from co-writes and I wanted to see what happened.”
What happened was Edmondson wrote the title track, “To the End.” It came easily he says, after a session of strumming the guitar at the foot of his bed. “I attribute that to what being in a place like that does to the voices in your head,” he says. “I got really, really excited once that happened.”
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Edmondson hadn’t released any new music since a 2015 EP, Augustus; his last full-length was 2010’s The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be. When he had enough songs written to consider recording, he turned to Bowen. The pair came up at the same time, getting their starts in college towns in the early 2000s. They were also both regular openers for Cross Canadian Ragweed, and it was at a Ragweed show that the two became friends. “Our jokes were right there with one another,” Bowen recalls of their first encounter.
When Bowen learned that Edmondson had a batch of new tunes, he offered to man the studio. Edmondson jumped at the chance.
“I was really proud that he trusted me in the entire process,” Bowen says of producing To the End. “He went along with it. The musicians loved working with him. He brought in a really unique group of songs. I was able to explain to the guys that Bleu was coming back from a break and we needed it to be some pretty epic-sounding stuff. They really went with that. I was worried that our friendship would get in the way and that didn’t happen at all.”
Once Edmondson released the EP, he immediately began managing expectations. He’s just dipping his toe back into music, after all. Instead of touring behind the project, he played a handful of concerts in the summer and fall at his favorite Texas listening rooms — Dosey Doe in the Woodlands, Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, and the Kessler Theater in Dallas. He has a spot on the lineup at the 2026 Mile 0 Fest in Key West in late January, but he wants to be clear: He’s not getting on a tour bus any time soon.
Those days, Edmondson says, he’d rather leave in his past.
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“Once I realized there was no brass ring and that I had done enough work to where I could play if I needed to,” he says, “this got me excited to do it the right way: Not just go play Bob’s Chucklefuck Hut or whatever on a Tuesday. I want to play this place if I’m going to play full-band. I want to play Cain’s if I’m going to play full-band. If not, I’m going to do a really cool acoustic show with three players in badass listening rooms. We’re not playing the circuit. We’re playing rooms that we think are cool, and we’re going to do it for the story.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
