Hayden Pedigo is part-man, part-myth, part-Texan, and part-picker—a banker in a past life, a viral political candidate during Trump’s first term, and a full-time musician making a masterpiece every two years on Mexican Summer’s dime. Since signing with the label responsible for releases from L’Rain, Cate Le Bon, and Jessica Pratt, he’s pulled in a strong reputation—thanks especially to Letting Go (2021) and The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored (2023, the first two entries in his so-called “Motor Trilogy.” Pedigo is arguably the millennial John Fahey, and he’s got enough industry cred to make a collab album with Chat Pile. Gigs with Jenny Lewis, Andy Shauf, Devendra Banhart, and Jess Williamson have even catapulted him into a class of his own, spawning one of the strongest live albums of this century in Live in Amarillo, Texas, which was so good we named it the 36th-best LP of 2024. But, unsurprisingly, his newest effort, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, is the strongest batch of songs Pedigo has ever made.
Named after an episode of Little House on the Prairie—a reference even more niche now that streaming has outmuscled syndication, but somehow less niche than the Douglas Kenney quote that The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored was titled after—the songs of I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away were recorded in Ojai, California under the guidance of William Tyler collaborator Scott Hirsch. Pedigo assembled a band of players—Hirsch, violinist Nathan Bieber, pianist Jens Kuross, pedal steel player Nicole Lawrence, and “phaser suggester” Forest Juziuk—to bring Jonathan Phillips’ idyllic cover painting to life in seven maximalist, fuss-filled streaks of phrase. Inspired by Fahey’s The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is a guitar album, but it’s Hayden Pedigo’s least-conventional guitar album yet.
I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is as warm as it is challenging—a paradox of storytelling that is personal yet world-consuming. Writing the songs on a 20,000-acre in Wyoming, Pedigo remembers a truck stop called “Jesus Christ is Lord Not a Swear Word Truck Stop Travel Centre” in Amarillo; he calls to mind the romance of watching mid-afternoon soaps. The album is touched by the Faheys and Robbie Bashos of the guitar world, naturally, yet its flourishes pull roots from Bladee’s Cold Visions and Popol Vuh just as lovingly. This is a total and affectionate rewrite of everything instrumental music could and ought to be, done through “micro-sampling” and concept manifestations. Did someone give Ry Cooder a tab of acid? Recording this music felt like “Evel Knievel jumping the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle,” Pedigo said.
After making The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, Hayden Pedigo left his hometown of Amarillo for the pastoral of Oklahoma, but the Southern tapestry of a song like “Long Pond Lily” could have only been woven by somebody with his feet always in both places. It sounds like the rustic string bends scoring the melancholy of Paris, Texas, with taut, mid-song tangents that advertise Pedigo’s innate sense of fable, as if his guitar’s topic changes after every sentence yet never abandons the plot. The chords are a monologue in the melody’s drama, and “All the Way Across” has a language of its own—in Pedigo’s unhurried plucks and Kuross’ piano notes drifting above the atmospheric clutter until they blur into each other. But I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away isn’t stuffy or stagnant; Hirsch’s mellotron on “Smoked” echoes and vibrates beneath the moods of Pedigo’s rubato, shading the guitar notes with a disarming dose of hauntological ephemera in the aftermath of “All the Way Across”’s metallic elaborations.
Bieber’s string arrangement on “Hermes” is a delicate, somber contrast to Pedigo’s affective, chipper bursts of reverbed harmony, which are in league with the playing of Bert Jansch on “Houndstooth.” A pause near the one-minute mark eclipses into a rush of violin; Bieber’s bow pulls are languid, but Pedigo’s guitar firms up the pacing before another segue cracks the song open completely—launching its tempo into spectacle through brief gusts of a small-world symphony. “Small Torch,” the album’s sanguine, penultimate medley, displays a violin arrangement swallowed by a veneer of overcast synth ambiance. The song eventually steers into focus, colored by Hirsch’s ebow and Pedigo’s string noise and speaking the vernacular of Chet Atkins and Cocteau Twins. Like his previous efforts on “Letting Go” and “The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored,” Pedigo continues his title track hot-streak on “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away.” The guitar notes are sincere and spacious, leaving enough room for the listener’s own surroundings to join the band. As I was listening to it, a bug tapped on the glass of a window beside me and its words fastened into the melody with ease.
In the hands of anyone else, it’d be a cheesy way to end an otherwise expressive, absurd unwinding of guitar traditionalism. But with Pedigo as the album’s steward, “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away” is a peaceful, potent conclusion to one of this century’s weirdest and handsomest triptychs, settling in a serenade of clarity that the preceding six tracks longed so tirelessly for. You can see Pedigo attempting to soundtrack an over-mythologized world—leaning into the perceived emptiness of the American West. His ramblings are great surveys of a songbook turned strange by geography; his portraits of loneliness and redemption covet a paintbrush hued with resolve. Like the “frustrated little symphonies” Fahey and Basho used to make, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is a 4-track dram of Western grievances flatpicked into restless, guitar music without stereotype. You won’t find any cowboys or tumbleweeds in the aching charm of Hayden Pedigo’s always-moving fingers, but these songs form a vibrant bounce of earnest picking that even the Ingalls family could love.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
