Hayden Pedigo Finds Peace on I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away

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.