Hayden Pedigo :: I’ll Be Waving As You Drive By
From the “Long Pond Lily” music video.
Directed by Matt Muir
Released exactly two years ago this month, Texas-based guitarist, cosmic composer, son of a truck-stop preacher, and western whisperer Hayden Pedigo set the record straight with what you can do on a instrumental guitar album with 2023’s “The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored,” but his 2025 follow-up, and epic ender to the ‘Motor Trilogy’ “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive By” is nothing short of a meditational miracle, considering the world we live in in all its galvanizing glory. Its biblical blaze can be seen from behind the wilting white lines of a dozen West South Central-based highways across the alchemy of America, whose harmonious hums burn through that merciless midnight oil that once stood for something. “This final entry in the ‘Motor Trilogy’ – the trio of albums recorded for Mexican Summer – is a story of hope, redemption, frustration, forgiveness, and how we are always in a constant state of leaving. This record is the culmination of everything I have ever been reaching for in my music,” says Pedigo about his most recent effort, and while the climate of our world remains cryptically hidden in the sorcery of a dictator’s stronghold on society, the musician shines through with his atmospheric abilities like never before. Carefully combining the contents of cultism and the pulverizing pulses of American psychedelia, the young composer sophistically stirs the ethereal echoes by gesturing to his generation the cosmic comfort that comes with poetic peace and instrumental intimacy. Signaling to the distant solar system with a tip of a hat, Pedigo perfectly provokes the tonality of theatre, and the creature comforts of cosplaying in the familiarity of the late, great Paul Reubens’ sweet and severely missed shadow. Bringing forward the alter ego of a bolo tie-wearing politician preaching peace, or a barefoot servant who carries a wooden sign with the classic captions from a Judgment Day manifesto, the composer has brought to the sonic surface perhaps his finest work to date.
“This is the album I have wanted to make since I was 15 years old. You can hear my entire musical journey in these songs.”
Sprawling across his home state’s ancient alphabet of lyrical legacy from the likes of Joe Ely to J.D. Souther, who passed only last year, Terry Stafford and his almighty anthem "Amarillo by Morning," which was later covered by George Strait, and several others, Pedigo’s weird world of metaphysical magic is painted with attitude based-acrylic, and poetic pastels, while hanging high as bountiful billboards in the guts of Middle America. Responsibly leaning into the shoulders of his heroes, and all-time inspirations such as Fahey, and the internal mechanisms of Tim Heidecker, “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive By” is perfectly personal in that all the cards have been played, the jokers have been stowed away in a detergent rich sock drawer, and all that’s left is an individual influenced by life and all its miraculous memory making moments. While the echoing entirety of the album isn’t solely reliant on being just a guitar-driven gesture like most of his previous works, it instead invites the epic existentialism of melodic motivation and the fiery foundation of freedom only found in sound. The album “a micro-dose psychedelic album. I wanted it to be this tangible feeling, as if somebody had cut up a tab of LSD and put on a Fahey record,” says Pedigo as each layer and song spirals into the suddenness of the universe and its explosive emptiness. With tracks like “Small Torch,” “All The Way Across,” and "the album’s title track coming together in this familiar yet newly established formation of meticulous melodies, and surveyed sounds, “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive By” is a brilliant landscape, whose atmospheric affairs are in order as we fall into more disorder in this Philip K. Dick dystopia daydream, while hope eagerly awaits on the harmonious horizon.
Photo: Jackie Young
