With I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away, Hayden Pedigo bids farewell to his native Texas Panhandle with a sonically lush and wistful conclusion to his Motor Trilogy.
Music can paint a landscape and chart geography as precisely as a cartographer’s chart or an artist’s brush. It is a sonic roadmap of worn-in memories, cracked roads as familiar as the creases in our hands. Evoking the dusty highways and endless horizons of the Texas Panhandle, Hayden Pedigo’s new album, I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away, beckons listeners to a pocket of the country largely overlooked and misunderstood. Hailing from Amarillo, Texas, nestled in the middle of the Panhandle, the fingerstyle instrumental guitarist salutes his hometown glory with the delicate yet vigorous plucking of his guitar—the record feels as much a celebration as it is a farewell, equal parts vibrant and wistful.
Pedigo’s work resembles a Texan-twang Nick Drake, summoning the British folk musician’s moody, atmospheric style, intricate melodies, and avant-garde sensibilities. I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away is the final chapter in Pedigo’s ‘The Motor Trilogy,’ woven together visually by their Jonathan Phillips artwork but also by their cohesive sound, “[…] intentionally maximalist, genre-resistant work of warped instrumental Americana.”
Pedigo dubs his latest record, which was released on June 6th via Mexican Summer, “a micro-dose psychedelic album…as if somebody had cut up a tab of LSD and put on a [John] Fahey record.” But on a deeper, human level, the album is an introduction, as alluded to by its cover art: “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.”
Since the release of 2023’s The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, Pedigo has ridden a wave of career-affirming highs, receiving critical acclaim, playing an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and touring with an eclectic range of musicians from Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis to Ichiko Aoba to Devendra Banhart. Amidst this success, Pedigo convened with his muses: he escaped to the galvanizing seclusion of a 20,000-acre Wyoming ranch to purge the dulcet melodies of I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away from his soul.
“They put me in a house all by myself, separate from everybody else, so it was dead silent […] You could hear your blood running through your body. I had this complete explosion of creativity.”
Of the experience, Pedigo recalls, “They put me in a house all by myself, separate from everybody else, so it was dead silent […] You could hear your blood running through your body. I had this complete explosion of creativity.” Recorded in Ojai with producer Scott Hirsch, the record takes its name from a 1978 Little House on the Prairie episode that stuck with Pedigo, describing it as “pretty devastating.”
A sense of aching nostalgia pervades each track, the consistent heartbeat of Pedigo’s acoustic guitar overlayed with lush piano and string accompaniment. It is an orchestra for a tender memory, a score to a bittersweet parting—Pedigo stirs a potent blend of baroque art-rock and bare, unadorned, and honest bluegrass. This nostalgia is intended, conveyed with the unspoken language of Pedigo’s instrumentation.
Reflecting on making the record, he mused, “[it] was written during an artist residency […] that happened to coincide with my last few months of living in Amarillo, Texas. It was definitely centered around the idea of leaving my home.”
I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away is a portrait of a period in Pedigo’s life, an amalgamation of geographical and musical influences. In the tradition of reminiscent road trip odysseys like Joni Mitchell’s 1976 opus Hejira, Pedigo states, “So many locations inspired this record. I wrote most of it in Wyoming, but I recorded it out in Ojai, California, with my friend Scott Hirsch.
So many different landscapes inspired the sound of the album. It was such a travel record.” In addition to John Fahey, his “guiding star influences” for the record include the early albums of Scott Walker, the German New Age ambient group Popol Vuh, and Van Dyke Parks. “[They] inspired the melodic direction of the record along with the in-depth overdubs we brought to these songs.”
“I don’t write much music at all, really. I wait up to a year and a half before I even write a song again […] it is a very focused process when I begin writing. It was just a very intense writing and recording process, super meticulous.”
Detailing his songwriting process, Pedigo muses, “I don’t write much music at all, really. I wait up to a year and a half before I even write a song again […] it is a very focused process when I begin writing. It was just a very intense writing and recording process, super meticulous.”
This combination of creative lacuna and intense bursts of focused creativity yields work that drips with emotional resonance, perhaps none more apparent than on Pedigo’s favorite and most personal song on the album, the title track, ‘I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away:’ “It’s kind of my farewell song to this trilogy and Amarillo. It’s very sentimental and sweet, but it has an element of sadness that conveys all of my emotions during that time; it feels like a goodbye.”
Imagery by Jackie Lee Young.
