By modeling for Gucci and running for city council in Amarillo, guitarist and recent Oklahoma City transplant Hayden Pedigo did music writers who don’t know enough music theory to intelligently write about his music the tremendous favor of giving us something else to talk about.
Fortunately, Pedigo’s new album, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, released Friday, June 6, is perfectly capable of speaking for itself. Enchanting and gently art damaged, his latest release completes a trilogy of albums blending gorgeous finger-picking with low-key experimentation, rewarding both easy and attentive listeners.
Check out the video for “Long Pond Lily,” the album’s lead single:
Pedigo, whose unsuccessful but entertaining city council run is documented in the 2021 film Kid Candidate, is also capable of speaking for himself, of course, so we let him. We talked about his new album and hometown and his upcoming collaboration with beloved OKC noisemakers Chat Pile.
How long have you lived in Oklahoma City?
I moved here last July, so not very long. Me and my wife have always liked Oklahoma City for years. We had always talked about moving here, and we finally decided to do it. I think the appeal was all of her family is still in Amarillo, Texas. It’s pretty easy to get down there and see family because it’s only, like, three and a half hours away. But it feels very different from Amarillo. For one, it’s a far bigger city. It’s not windy all the time. Things are actually green and not dead. And I think, I don’t know, the people are a lot nicer. People are very nice here.
The press material for I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away presents it as a more personally revealing album than past releases. How does that work for an instrumental album?
So I think the way it works with instrumental music is the primary thing I do when I write songs is I focus on melody, and my melodies are inspired by my life and things that I’m feeling at that time. Because I feel like my albums are weirdly diaries covering periods of time
in my life, I have a lot of people come up to me and say, ‘Your music feels very lonely.’ I’ve heard that for years, and I’ve noticed people are able to pick out emotions from instrumental music. I think people can pick up the story even without there being words. My melodies are very nostalgic and longing, lonely and kind of sad, but also optimistic. So I think people can pick up on those feelings and it can feel like an emotional album without even saying a word, because I’m kind of telling people my life story through melodies instead of words.
So when people talk to you about how your music feels to them, it does tend to reflect how you felt when you were making it?
Yes. I think people are able to pick up on that more than I even was aware of. I’ve been really surprised how much people are able to pick up on certain emotions in my songs that I might not have even put out there what I was going through when I wrote it. But people can pick up on that thing and, you know, even apply it to themselves. I think that’s what’s interesting about my music, is it can soundtrack my own life, but people can then take it and it soundtracks their own. I’ve had so many people tell me the experiences or major life moments that my music has soundtracked, and it’s been everything from great times in their life or really dark times in their life. So, yeah, I find it to be very emotional.
Does anything about this album in particular feel specifically vulnerable when you were recording it or writing it?
This album was particularly vulnerable for me because I wrote all of these songs during an artist residency I did in Wyoming. There’s this foundation called the Ucross Foundation, and … I went up there and stayed in a house by myself just out in the quiet. And it was very intense in ways I wasn’t expecting, specifically the silence. I think it made me just face some things internally I didn’t even know I needed to face. And this was all in the midst of writing these songs. And then add on top of that, this album is the ending to a trilogy of records I started writing back in 2020, so there’s, like, this ending that I’m trying to come to grips with. These three records have really defined my life since 2020, and there’s this uncertainty of what comes after this. I feel like I shared some really personal parts of myself in these records that I think isn’t typical for this kind of music, specifically instrumental acoustic guitar music.
What is your creative relationship with silence? Is that where you find your ideas, or do you tend to have music going in the background most of the time?
Well, I do listen to a lot of music, but when I’m writing music, I tend to stay in silence just because I don’t like to be distracted or influenced as much when I’m writing. So I tend to just give myself as much space when writing new music, especially because my songs do have a lot of long pauses in them. I do embrace silence a lot in my music, especially my live shows. I try to utilize silence as much as I can.
Speaking of your live shows, have you played in Oklahoma City very much?
I played one show since I moved here. I played at Resonant Head one time last year, but that’s about it. I haven’t really had a chance to play shows here. I’ve been touring quite a bit and haven’t gotten to spend as much time here as I would like just yet.
A lot of the stuff written about your music tends to talk about how it reflects the landscape of West Texas and the experience of living there. Has Oklahoma City impacted your music yet?
I feel like the Oklahoma influence, it’s a little too early to tell. That will definitely show when I start writing. Recently, I made a full record with Chat Pile, and I feel like it was weird working with them. I brought my Texas Panhandle sound to that album, but it merged with their sound, which is very much influenced by here, this landscape, so that probably created a shift in my music that I’m not even aware of yet.
How did that collaboration happen?
I basically just shot them a message over Instagram the first day I moved here and then quickly met up with all of them. They were so nice and accepting and welcoming to me and my wife, like immediately really, really great people. And the idea to collaborate happened pretty shortly afterward. It felt supernatural, and then a record, an album happened. It happened so naturally, and we did it all in person, but it was kind of a mind-blowing experience. It was very easy. It was not difficult. It just flowed really, really well.
They were they were excellent to collaborate with, and I love their approach to music. They just know so much music. I think that’s why they collaborate so well, is their knowledge of music is very, very wide reaching, so I loved working with them.
Would you say that you came closer to their sound, they came closer to yours, or did you find some sort of middle ground?
I think we found an entirely new thing. It’s like melding both sounds, but it created this whole new thing that I don’t know if any of us have ever done before. It just felt brand new and really, really cool. I think people will like it. It’s pretty crazy.
Is there a release date for that?
I don’t have a confirmed release date yet. I can definitely say it’s coming out, I believe, this year.
I read you said I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away was more challenging to record than your other albums. Are these songs harder to play live?
Oh, yeah. Talking about playing the show here at Resonant Head, what was interesting about that show particularly is I did that show as a way to test out these new songs after I had written them and recorded this album shortly after. But the problem was, I guess I underestimated how much I needed to build up my muscle memory to play these songs live because that show was honestly a disaster to be quite honest. It was like a train wreck because I just wasn’t prepared to play those songs yet. They were a lot more challenging than anything I’d written before, so they were a lot harder to play live. So I have now played them on the road quite a bit to just build up muscle memory with them, and I feel like I can play all these songs live pretty well now.
Does this album feel more like a conclusion or a transition?
I mean, I think it feels like a conclusion to this trilogy. It’s a massive level up from the last two records. I think it’s ending on the best record, but it still very much feels tied in with those two, and it does feel like the three make up like one large album or film trilogy. The idea is I want the albums to seamlessly loop where you could just put in this record and immediately go back to the first album called Letting Go, and you can just listen to it all together. So it feels like a conclusion, but it’s ending on the highest note that I could. I think it’s the best one.
Are there specific songs from your discography that people seem to latch on to?
I have a song called “Carthage” that a lot of people approach me about. I think something about “Carthage” feels very dreamy. It feels like a fantasy or something. It, it feels like a different world even to me. … I think that that feeling runs through all of my music. I think there’s this otherworldly quality that I’m always trying to tap into. My new record also has some moments that feel like that. They don’t sound like that song, per se, but they have that dreamy feeling, the half-awake thing.
Visit haydenpedigo.com.
This article appears in Oklahoma Gazette Online.