Mexican Summer & Anthology

Hayden Pedigo: man, myth, master of disguise; un-picker, finger-picker, absurdist, perfectionist. The unorthodox contender for Amarillo City Council, subject of the film Kid Candidate, and creator of the acclaimed Letting Go (2021) and The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored (2023) now embarks upon the release of his new album I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away. An innovator of the instrumental genre, challenger of the stereotypical, son of a truck-stop preacher, he backs up a cherry red Silverado under his own smiling, Brylcreemed and Nudie-Suited billboard. His foot hesitates above the gas pedal as a cloud of dust rises. Where between beaming advert and disillusioned entertainer might his truest self lie? On this intentionally maximalist, genre-resistant work of warped instrumental Americana — an exclamation point at the end of an accidental trilogy of records — we, and Hayden, might just be about to find out.

Unlike its predecessors in ‘The Motor Trilogy’ (tied together by their vehicular Jonathan Phillips artwork) — which offset the clarity of sparse acoustic compositions with a carousel of personas and outfits — I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away sees Hayden turn his practice inside out, set fire to the dressing up box, throw all other modern acoustic guitar records to the flames, and trip on the fumes. Solidly honing in on his technical craft after two years of non-stop touring with the likes of Jenny Lewis, Devendra Banhart and Hiss Golden Messenger, Hayden Pedigo is ready to peel back the curtain and let the world in. His most emotionally candid record, “there’s something really human” about this final installment, Hayden professes. “No face paint, no blue skin, the character on the front is no longer a character — it’s actually just me. I’m trying to tell the audience, I actually want you to meet me, I want you to know who I am.”

Taking cues from John Fahey’s weed-and-whiskey infused, tape-loop-heavy 1966 record The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is, Hayden reflects, not a straightforward solo guitar record, but in a sense “a micro-dose psychedelic album. I wanted it to be this tangible feeling, as if somebody had cut up a tab of LSD and put on a Fahey record.” Unafraid to push the parameters of American primitive, the walls of the album’s world are fuzzed-up and glimmering. Pedigo’s trademark, highly skilled guitar compositions, more intricate than ever, are augmented by influences he’s never been able to achieve on previous records. There are whispers of the prog-rock mellotrons of King Crimson and the heavy phasers and bass of Led Zeppelin; all helped along nicely by the psychedelic sensibilities of producer Scott Hirsch [Hiss Golden Messenger, The Court & Spark, William Tyler]. However it is vital and natural, says Hayden, to also be influenced by contemporary modern music in order not to make an esoteric, rambling solo guitar record. For example, Bladee’s Cold Visions — “a masterclass of experimental rap music” — inspired some similarities in approach, despite the artists’ distinctly different genre backgrounds. “There are so many records buried within this record…there’s a lot of micro-sampling going on, like a rap album,” he concludes (though this manifests in echoes and phrases, rather than direct lifts).

I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away additionally draws strongly from the uncanny psychedelia of larger-than-life culture in the American South, so often bigger, stranger, more unnerving than fiction. There are allusions to Pedigo’s upbringing in Amarillo, Texas; where he recalls, for example, “a truck stop whose full business name was ‘Jesus Christ is Lord Not a Swear Word Truck Stop Travel Centre’” — and afternoons watching Little House on the Prairie. I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away takes its title from a “pretty devastating” Little House on the Prairie episode from 1978, which has stuck with Pedigo into adulthood. Now living in Oklahoma, he references the state’s noise rock outfit Chat Pile (with whom a collaborative record is on the horizon) as kindred minds, their “extra zoomed-in look at the landscape where they’re from, the absurdity of it, the frustration” finding common ground with his own approach. All of his records are frustrated records, he asserts.

It is a frustration drawn partially from a drive to compete with his past selves, striving to make ever-better records. “When I’m making music, it’s fear and desperation that fuels the creation…there’s a bar that I have to surpass that I’ve created. These records are made out of a panicked paranoia.” The intense, obsessive writing-rehearsing process endured on The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored “only got more severe” during the making of I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, Pedigo stationed at Ucross; an artist residency on a 20,000-acre ranch in Wyoming. “They put me in a house all by myself, separate from everybody else, so it was dead silent…no road sounds, no anything. You could hear your blood running through your body. I had this complete explosion of creativity.” The pieces, more technically and emotionally demanding than the previous records, “just kept getting harder…it was the hardest album I’ve ever recorded, in terms of playing it. There were parts I had to re-take forty times. In the moment it felt like Evel Knievel jumping the grand canyon on a motorcycle.”

The album opens on ‘Long Pond Lily’, an outsized and fragrant bloom of intent; a simultaneous echo of Hayden’s previous work and a big, blousy departure. “It’s very heavy and huge” he reflects, “the low end is rattling on it — it sounds bonkers, and feels like it’s on the verge of going off the rails. It's so maximalist, so much more energetic than anything I’ve ever written.” Throughout I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, moments of genre-defying, unapologetic exuberance are carefully balanced with delicacy and intricacy. The liquid metallicism and quietly cascading piano of ‘All the Way Across’ morphs into the doomy, sludgy electronics and mellotron choirs of ‘Smoked’ (inspired by Popol Vuh’s 1970s Werner Herzog soundtracks); the light touch, wings, string arrangements and glass sculptures of ‘Houndstooth’ and ‘Hermes’ are counterbalanced by the blurry Victorialand-era Cocteau Twins electric guitars of ‘Small Torch’. The title track is, says Hayden, “weirdly the least like-me song on the album; it’s doing a lot of things that I don’t think anyone’s heard in my music before. It feels like a 1950s Chet Atkins/Merle Travis picking piece, very bright, very bouncy, very on-the-nose classic. It’s like I removed all irony from my music. It’s so sincere that I think it will be startlingly sincere, jarring even, for some people.”

Though not initially conceived as a triptych, Letting Go, The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored and I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away have since revealed their connections to their creator. “I like being surprised, slowly solving this puzzle of my own work. Now that I’ve finished this record it feels circular: if you end I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away and start again at the first track on Letting Go, it feels like you’re re-starting the movie — but the context grows deeper.”

The trilogy’s narrative is inescapably tied to Hayden’s relationship with his hometown — the first record written when he first left to live in Lubbock, the second coinciding with a move back to Amarillo, and this third completed as he left Amarillo for the final time. He is frank: he hopes the completion of the ‘The Motor Trilogy’ will allow him to find peace. “There’s all these emotions running through these records: loneliness, hope, forgiveness, redemption, frustration, and I want this record to be the resolve.”

Hayden conceals one final jack-in-the-box at the end of the record’s vinyl pressing. Floating over an eerie, dreamy piece of 4-track music from his archives is the artist’s own voice, “the last thing you expect to hear on an instrumental guitar record.” Though we finally meet the maker, tenderly look him in the eye, it is all too brief; I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away plays itself out, and with a tip of the hat, a creak of the mechanical arm, a slam of the truck door and a puff of smoke, Hayden Pedigo is gone — just as quickly as he was revealed.