By Graham Whitney

Photos by Jackie Lee Young

“Difficult and beautiful, all at the same time.” 

When asked how to describe his hometown of Amarillo, Texas, nothing but an empty scape—a stereotypical image of middle-of-nowhere texas—this is the sentiment that Texas-born guitarist Hayden Pedigo shares. Amarillo sits on a high plain in the Texan panhandle, an offbeat townscape, a place where the lack of any symbol, or accolades, makes its residents so prideful to it. Pedigo, a second-coming pioneer in the American Primitivism and Avant-Garde guitar sound, inspired by older guitarists like John Fahey, Robbie Basho, and Leo Kottke. 

Pedigo, a once promising candidate for Amarillo City Council and former attendance clerk, has fully shifted his focus to music, pushing past the Texas panhandle and reaching global audiences. Coming off the release of his latest project, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, a project with Mexican Summer, Pedigo closes out what he names his “Motor Trilogy”, consisting of his 2021 release Letting Go, and his 2023 release The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored. Each project is unique in style, story, and melody, but consistent with its ambient description of Pedigo’s hometown of Amarillo, a theme consistent in almost all of Pedigo’s music. 

Pedigo just returned from a 6-week venture across Europe, traversing 8,000 miles through Belgian countryside and British motorways. Before he heads out for his North America tour, KUPS had the opportunity to talk with Pedigo, reflecting on his time in Europe, new directions, future collaborations, and more.

Q: We wanted to start with, how was Europe? You just got back from your tour, maybe, like, a week ago, you spoke online about some pretty incredible shows, you said you played maybe your best show ever. How was it? Do you got any parting words from your time there?

Pedigo: Yeah, it was a wild tour. It was a long one. It was six weeks long. Was only my second time going over to Europe, but it was the longest tour over there I’ve done so far. I drove the entire tour in a rental car I picked up in Amsterdam. And when I picked up the rental car, it had, it had, I think, 200 miles on it. When I returned it, it had like 8001. So a lot of driving, I had to clarify to people, no, that wasn’t kilometers, because it was like kilometers, 8000 plus miles on the rental car. So I’m glad I got a rental car with unlimited miles, because I needed it. But it was, yeah, so many incredible shows. Some of the best shows I’ve ever played were on that tour from Dublin to Paris to London, yeah. So just our shows, a great audience that’s over there.

Q: So you said this was kind of your second stint in Europe, if you were to go back and stay in one city from the tour and write an entire project, or whatever that would be. Where would you do it? Like if you had to stay in that city.

Pedigo: That’s a tough one. That’s really tough. I mean, I don’t know if I could pick a particular place, but it would probably be some small town in either Denmark or Germany, like somewhere, like very sleepy, like those would be most attracted to writing something. 

Q: You spoke a little bit online about how this tour that you have coming up is kind of going to be almost the end of an era for how you’re going to be performing. Can you give any hints? Or do you have any ideas as to what your dream live performance setup is going to look like, if you could tease anything towards that…

Pedigo: Well, I mean, I have a lot of ideas moving forward, because I think I’m going to explore a lot of new directions, Yeah, but I mean, ideally I wanted to perform live with strings and string section or like other performers, be it bass or synthesizers and drums or things like that. And I do think that’s an element I’m wanting to start exploring with live performance, because I feel like I’ve really honed in on the solo performance side of things over the past two, three years. You know, I’m getting ready to kind of explore some new things now.

Q: Shifting the focus to talk about your upcoming project with Chatpile, you just released an incredible song with them, but what is it like working with these guys? You really shocked the scene with the announcement of your collaboration, and I could not have imagined a more instance crossover. How is it like working with them and kind of with a group that’s using lyrics in their writing. I will say that your music is lyrical, but I guess what was it like for someone like you who is purely instrumental in their music? Was recording like, ‘Pedigo’s gonna show up and he’s gonna play us little diddy, and then we’re gonna, like, go around that’ or was it kind of this whole collaborative thing from the start? 

Pedigo: Well, yeah, I’ll say working with Chatpile was incredible. There’s some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. I mean, incredibly easy to collaborate with, because they’re all very skilled, and their taste in music is so broad that they’re pulling so many interesting directions. They’re very flexible. They can play so many different kinds of zones and sounds. 

But essentially, the way it works is, we made the album over six weeks, and it kind of became like this very streamlined factory style process where nearly every day we were coming into the studio, this home studio, the bass player Stin has, and we would essentially just every day someone would bring a new idea, you know, be it a riff or something, and we would all one by one, add pieces to it, and it would be the simplest song, and then vocals would be the last part of it. So, I mean, yeah, it was just everyone bringing ideas to the table and then charting it out on a dry erase board, building them up piece by piece. It was just, it was a very fluid project. It was incredibly easy to do.

Q: I wanted to ask you a little bit about open and alternate tunings. I feel like we are in this resurgence or renaissance of artists using alternate tunings in their music, and you are someone who uses them in a very unique way in your musical toolbox. Could you give some insight on how you are creating these tunings? Are you basing them off of any musical theory, or is it just something you do as you go when you are writing a song?

Pedigo: *Cut out* –open tunings that a lot of people have used before, like open C or open B. Other times I will, you know, tune to a certain tuning. I open C and then start changing one or two tuning pegs, yeah, go, okay, that variation on that tuning sounds cool. Or sometimes I’ll just completely just start messing with tuning pegs and come off of some random thing and then write a song in that it’s not really based on any kind of music theory. It’s purely based on ear and mood.

 And I mean, there was one time where I was kind of having, like I was having trouble finding some creative inspiration to write a new song. And I found a website of all the tunings of Joni Mitchell, and I found one of her tunings that, you know, I never heard the song it was used for, but I tuned my guitar to this Joni Mitchell tuning, and loved it. And it’s fine that Joni Mitchell tuning is what I use on the chat pile, collab, radio, active dream. Oh, wow, yeah. So, I mean, it’s just kind of like stuff like that. I’ll just dig around and find something that sounds cool.

Q: How long do you find yourself sitting on a song for, or, like an idea, or, how has this changed as you’ve grown as a guitarist? Are you evolving these songs as they go, or are you more of a time block scheduler, someone who is ‘Okay, I could write something right now and then you sit down and do it.’

Pedigo: Yeah, I’m pretty rigid with my songwriting process. I don’t write a lot of music usually, like, I will schedule time to write an album, and then what I do is I basically sit down and we’ll start writing a song, and then I’ll get an idea. I just kind of feel around until I find a melody I like. And then basically it takes me about one to two weeks, I think, to write a song, and then I usually don’t write another song until after that one is finished. Yeah, I mean, but I’ve gotten songs done quicker than two weeks, sometimes less than a week, but it tends to be in that kind of timeframe. I’m pretty rigid on how I write, yeah. 

Q: So are you scheduling like time into your you know, like blocking out time to be like, okay, this is creative song writing time or is it more like this time of my week?

Pedigo: Yeah, I schedule time like, I’m gonna sit down from 9am to 3pm and finish a song.

Q: What are you listening to right now? Anything inspiring you after the release of your last record? 

Pedigo: Oh, I mean, there’s, there’s a lot of great stuff I’ve been listening to. There’s an acoustic guitar record by this guy, Barry Archie Johnson. That’s really good. You know, new records by like Joanne Robertson, stuff like that. There’s another band called Shallowater out of Houston.

Oh I love shallowater, they are great yeah.

Pedigo: Yeah I just played on their newest record, I played on a song called ‘All My Love’

Q: Like I said we’re a college radio station and far, far away from Amarillo and the Panhandle. You speak a lot about Amarillo and your writing and your music and your identity. If you were to give away one sentence or one way to describe Amarillo, and where you’re from, to the people of the Pacific Northwest and our listeners, what would you describe?

Pedigo: Difficult and beautiful, at the same time. Like, that’s, that’s the two words that, just like, come to mind, it’s difficult and beautiful and not, you know, no other way I could describe.

Well, Pedigo, it was wonderful speaking to you, I look forward to your show in Seattle on Halloween. But I wish you luck on your drive, and thank you so much for chatting.

Pedigo: Yeah thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Hayden Pedigo will be performing live in Seattle, Washington, October 31st at the Ballard Homestead. He will be accompanied by Jens Kuross as an opener for the show and rest of the tour.