Culture Cabinet

Hayden Pedigo’s music has always felt like a mirage in the desert: vivid, uncanny, and emotionally elusive. With the release of his latest album I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, the Texas-born guitarist closes the door on a trilogy of albums that map a deeply personal emotional terrain. One shaped by childhood television, long silences, Americana mysticism, and the endless act of departure.

The album title alone signals something unmistakably bittersweet. It stems from an episode of Little House on the Prairie: a show that left a lasting impression on a young Pedigo. “I grew up watching that show because I was a homeschooled kid. My dad was a preacher, so I watched quite a bit of that show, and I always thought it was a pretty strange show, and the episode in particular stood out to me over the years,” he says in an interview with Culture Cabinet. 

That episode, the one where central character Mary Ingalls goes blind, wasn’t just dramatic television. For Pedigo, it offered an emotional shorthand. “When I was writing this final album, I was trying to be really intentional on the title, and it just so happened that I wrote it not long before moving away from my hometown of Amarillo [Texas] for the final time,” he explains. “So it was kind of this weird, nostalgic title going back to my childhood. The title fit very well with where I was in life at that moment. So it was kind of the perfect title. It felt like a gift. So, it was pretty cool.”

The instrumental nature of Pedigo’s work only adds to its openness. It’s less a story being told, and more a mood being conjured. “I don’t write much music. I take long breaks, like a year or two in between writing new songs,” he says. “I’ll take a break for a year to two years, and won’t write a single thing. And my idea behind that is it’s kind of my way to absorb enough life, new experiences and things that happen to then write new music, not necessarily based on those things, it’s like this intangible thing where I’m pulling from, kind of like my subconsciousness.”

It’s a fishing expedition of the mind, guided not by words but by tone and feeling. “I’ll sit with my guitar and kind of I’m fishing for moods and ideas. And if I find a mood or feeling I like, I follow that until I have a song written.”

When it comes to naming those mood driven compositions, Pedigo leans impressionistic. “I’ll pick up a random book and just start flipping through pages, looking for a word or something that I’m like, ‘Oh, I like that word.’ It’s not always like a direct reference to what the song is about.” Some titles are plucked for their sound alone. “Carthage,” for instance, came not from the ancient city but from the 1996 Jon Krakauer book, Into the Wild. “Sometimes it’s super loose,” Pedigo explains. “I just like the the way the word sounds, or where it came from, and it’s not directly related to me so much as it’s related to a mood.”

With I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, Pedigo completes what has become an accidental trilogy, following 2021’s Letting Go and 2023’s The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored. “I think that  came clear to me after the first record, Letting Go, was finished. That album was a major breakthrough for me,” he says. The continuity was reinforced visually by the artwork of Jonathan Phillips. “Before I even started the second record, I knew I was going to use the same artist, it was pretty clear that these stories were interconnected.”

That aesthetic consistency is no accident, and are a result of Pedigo’s painstaking devotion to attention to detail. “Even down to the color contrast and brightness of the paintings,” he says in reference to the trio’s three corresponding album covers, “Even having one of the covers slightly darker than the others in terms of vibrance would have thrown it off. So we had to be so particular on the scans that they looked identical, they had to explode in color.”

And now, with the trilogy complete, he admits he has no idea what comes next. “I do work so far out I give myself a long break before deciding what my next record will will sound like. My fear has always been that if I write stuff too close to each other, they’ll be too similar in nature.” Still, he confesses a pull toward the grand and the beautiful. “There’s a lot of maximalist tendencies I want to still pursue. I think I’m still really obsessed with making beautiful music. But, as of right now, I think this new record is the best thing I’ve ever made.”

When asked when he knows he’s ready to create again, Pedigo answers with precision. “Usually I start to get the bug six months after an album has been released. I start to think about it. I don’t start working on it or writing necessarily, but that’s usually when I start allowing myself just to have ideas or consider directions.”

Each record, for Pedigo, is a film. Not a lo-fi vignette, but a big-budget emotional epic. “To be frank, I think I put more work into them than the average instrumental guitar record. I think I treat them more like a big budget affair. That’s what I’m going for.”

This cinematic ambition is part of why Little House on the Prairie resonates so deeply with him. “I’ve always said it’s very subtly psychedelic,” he says. “There’s so much about it that’s really strange and almost off putting, which is strange for what on the surface seems to be a wholesome family show. And I think I relate to that with my music: it can appear very wholesome and sweet,  but if you look at the album covers, there is an element of off-ness, like something is wrong.”

Themes of departure and melancholy thread through the trilogy. “The theme of [this album] is about how we’re all in a constant state of leaving. There’s a deep sorrow in leaving,” Pedigo reflects. “Leaving can mean good things like growth and pursuit of dreams, but when you leave, you’re letting things go, which goes back to the first record. Then the second record talks about living through things we might not want to recognize, and then this record is about being in that constant state of leaving.”

Hayden Pedigo’s trilogy doesn’t end with a grand finale so much as it, like its televisual inspiration, waves goodbye from the rearview mirror. It’s subtle, psychedelic, emotionally intricate, and unmistakably sincere.

You can listen to I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away below.