Since the release of his 2023 record, 'The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored', Pedigo earned widespread critical acclaim, performed a stunning NPR Tiny Desk Concert, toured non-stop with the likes of Jenny Lewis, Devendra Banhart and Hiss Golden Messenger, and more. He then decamped on a 20,000-acre ranch at an artist residency in Wyoming to write his new album, which he’d later record in Ojai with Scott Hirsch and name for a “pretty devastating” episode of Little House on the Prairie from 1978. The resulting album, 'I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away', is the final installment of what Pedigo has dubbed 'The Motor Trilogy’ – his three latest solo albums, tied together by their vehicular Jonathan Phillips artwork. An innovator of the instrumental genre, challenger of the stereotypical, and son of a truck-stop preacher, Pedigo has crafted an intentionally maximalist, genre-resistant work of warped instrumental Americana on this release, which he calls “a micro-dose psychedelic album…as if somebody had cut up a tab of LSD and put on a Fahey record.” 

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: On his latest album Hayden's mesmerizing finger picked guitars conjure up images of dusty sunbaked landscapes and endless highways. A wonderfully evocative album, perfect for lazy Sunday listening.

TRACK LISTING

1. Long Pond Lily
2. All The Way Across
3. Smoked
4. Houndstooth
5. Hermes
6. Small Torch
7. I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away

A collaboration forged in the heart of the American Midwest, 'In The Earth Again' unites Oklahoma City’s noise rock institution Chat Pile with Texas/Oklahoma’s visionary guitarist and composer Hayden Pedigo.
What began as a casual split release idea spiraled into a thirty-six-minute album that threads their contrasting sensibilities into something entirely new.

Pedigo’s panoramic, primitive guitar, meets Chat Pile’s industrial decay, creating a record that explores unknown emotional registers and atmospheric depth for both, In The Earth Again sounds like a post-apocalyptic transmission from rural nowhere.

Instead of making concessions, the five artists work as a single unit, and each decision is made in support of the greater vision. The result is both intimate and expansive, a tribute to the modern wasteland.

TRACK LISTING

1. Outside
2. Demon Time
3. Never Say Die
4. Behold A Pale Horse
5. Magic Of The World
6. Fission/Fusion
7. The Matador
8. I’ve Got My Own Blunt To Smoke
9. Radioactive Dreams
10. Inside
11. A Tear For Lucas

So run the reels of The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, Pedigo’s sixth studio album (and second for Mexican Summer) in the cinema of your ear; its script written in steel-string, its starring director a 28-year-old performance artist, politician, model, and fingerstyling maestro whose talent is as irrepressible as it is undeniable.

Pedigo has lived many lives, having been homeschooled in Amarillo, Texas by his truck-stop preacher father; run for Amarillo City Council in 2019, aged 25—as documented by Jasmine Stodel’s SXSW-premiering, PBS-acquired film Kid Candidate—and struck up pen-friendships and collaborative partnerships with the likes of Terry Allen, Charles Hayward (This Heat), Werner “Zappi” Diermaier (Faust), and Tim Heidecker. A move south from Amarillo to Lubbock in 2020 put a spark to the powder keg of his creativity. “It’s even more flat, desolate, windy and dirty – like being on Mars,” Pedigo observes. “It’s pushed me to create more because there’s not really much to distract.” The move produced not only The Happiest Timesand its predecessor Letting Go, but also an Internet presence that showcases a panoply of ever-more outlandish outfits and an effortless deadpan wit. Both the former and the latter helped parlay him into the fashion world, too, having walked the runway for Gucci and been photographed by Hedi Slimane.

Inspired by the tragicomedic legacy of National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney (in whose notes the line ‘These last few days are amongst the happiest I’ve ever ignored’ was found following his mysterious and untimely death), Pedigo embarked upon The Happiest Times with a no-shit aim: to create “the best instrumental acoustic guitar album of the past twenty years.” Though canonical works of comedy and music show their influence—the mournful beauty of Nick Drake, the puckish abandon of John Fahey—Pedigo by no means places their creators on pedestals; if anything pulling them from their plinths, smashing the alabasters, pocketing some pieces, gluing others back together upside down, or leaving them floating free.

How might Fahey have played in a Midwest emo band? Pedigo posits on “Nearer, Nearer,” while the specters of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn float somewhere above “Signal of Hope” – “the most British-sounding thing I’ve ever written;” an echo in an empty church. Pedigo flits through the cycle of songs, coiling and uncoiling like the mechanism of a clockwork bird on “When It’s Clear;” rambling, a tiny speck in the landscape, on “Elsewhere.” “Then It’s Gone” stands as stark as a leafless tree, guitar spilling a somber tale in its truest voice – and nowhere more than on the title track is Pedigo’s playing more affecting: regret and optimism balanced on intimate, intricate arrangement, as carefully poised as raindrops on guitar strings.


If the rolling strings of Letting Go planted and germinated the seeds, then The Happiest Times sees Hayden grow the flowers, admire their ruffles, and take newly sharpened scissors to the stems; turmoil and perfectionism and the gods of chaos driving the hand that holds the shears. “I want to create something very melodic, and then put it behind a barbed wire fence,” Hayden reflects. “If you’re gonna get this pretty thing, then you might get cut up trying to get to it.”

At their most profound, Pedigo’s spacious, pristine soundscapes communicate an essential truth about the pursuit of artistic perfection. Creating The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored was, he surmises, a process akin to “the dog chasing the mail truck – what do you do when you catch it?”

TRACK LISTING

1 Looking At The Fish
2 When It’s Clear
3 Elsewhere
4 Nearer, Nearer
5 Signal Of Hope
6 The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored
7 Then It’s Gone

Hayden Pedigo is an acoustic guitarist and soundscape composer from Amarillo, Texas. Perhaps most widely known for his endearing bid for Amarillo city council at the tender age of 25, after his Harmony Korine inspired spoof campaign video went viral. Hayden's music is equally enchanting, combining the American primitive guitar picking styles of John Fahey with a proclivity for experimental sound design and manipulation.

By his early 20s, Hayden had already collaborated with luminaries such as Charles Hayward of This Heat, Fred Frith, Werner Diermaier of Faust, and outlaw country legend, Terry Allen. However it's important to expect the unexpected with Hayden Pedigo.

With album artwork that depicts black metal connotations and a sworn hater of the term "Cosmic Country", Hayden's satirical sense of humour extends from the various characters he portrays on his Instagram page and into every fibre of his being.

'Kid Candidate', a 67 minute documentary made about Hayden's Amarillo City Council bid (dir. Jasmine Stodel) will be digitally released on July 2 2021 by production company and distributor, Gunpowder & Sky. It made its worldwide film festival premiere at SXSW 2021 and will be released on blu-ray in September 2021. Music from Letting Go also features in Kid Candidate.

TRACK LISTING

1. Letting Go
2. Carthage
3. Something Absolute
4. Some Kind Of Shepherd
5. Tints Of Morning
6. I Wasn't Dreaming
7. Rained Like Hell