Hayden Pedigo on chasing feelings, leaving Texas and the hidden meaning in his music

Panhandle-raised guitarist and composer Hayden Pedigo has built a career on instrumental music that somehow feels diaristic – songs that can communicate deep emotion without ever saying a word.

His latest album, “I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away,” caps his “Motor Trilogy” of albums and coincides with a major life change: Leaving his hometown of Amarillo for Oklahoma City. But he’s not resting on his laurels either, as Pedigo has already released a new collaborative album with his new OKC pals in the noise rock band Chat Pile.

Pedigo spoke with the Standard during a recent run of solo dates across Texas. The conversation covered hometown ghosts, unlikely collaborations, the power of live performance, and big personal news that arrived in the middle of a European tour. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: “I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away” feels deeply personal, but like most of your music, it’s purely instrumental. How do you translate those emotions, those feelings, into sound without words?

Hayden Pedigo: I think it’s because those songs are telling the story of the past 10 years of my life. And when I write, even though I don’t have lyrics, I’m writing primarily based on mood and feeling.

I don’t know, I tend to feel things kind of intensely. And when I write a song, I’m trying to capture that feeling or tap into that feeling.

So the melancholy, the optimism and the hope and the redemption, all these feelings I think people pick up on them because I feel like I’m putting that into my songs. I’m not entirely sure how I do it, but I think it’s just chasing the feeling.

Speaking of feelings, you moved from Amarillo to Oklahoma City. Does that idea of leaving your hometown in Texas play into your songwriting, or even as you see yourself as an artist?

Oh, it certainly does. I mean, I lived in Amarillo for most of my life, and I moved to Oklahoma City last summer.

And what was strange is I got in the U-Haul and moved the day after I came home from recording “I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away.” So it was it was wild to me that the trilogy of albums I made called the Motor Trilogy ends on this record, “I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away” and then coincides with me leaving my hometown, without the intention of ever coming back there or living there again. It was like the final chapter.

So I think you can feel it intensely in the songs, because Amarillo influenced my writing so much. It’s such a huge part of my music. But it’s deeply linked to me leaving.

And you really feel like you’re gone forever? You couldn’t ever see yourself being back in the Panhandle?

No, I don’t think I could ever live in Amarillo again.

Well you share a lot of your writing on your Instagram page, using it almost like a diary, it feels. In one recent post, you described your songs as pieces of context for things that haven’t happened yet.

What does that mean to you – that your music somehow predicts or proceeds real experiences?

Well, that’s what’s the interesting thing about writing these instrumental pieces. I’ll be chasing a feeling and write the song based around a feeling, but it’s happened where I write a song, then a few months later I realized what the song was about and it usually coincides with an event in my life that happens.

The context all comes together. And I’ve even had people come up to me at shows and ask me, “Hey, is this song about this?” And I’ve realized, oh, you’re right, it is about that. It’s like digging and trying to find what the meaning is, but it just takes a bit longer.

But I like that idea of working backwards. Make the art and find the meaning later. Don’t have meaning and make art for it. You know? I like working in the reverse.

Well, your newest release is a collaboration with some friends you’ve really connected with in Oklahoma City: Chat Pile, who play a noisy, sludgy, abrasive type of rock. But the album has also some truly beautiful moments as well.

Can you talk about how that album came about and what it was like putting that together?

So I worked with the band Chap Pile because, like I said, I moved to Oklahoma City last summer, and I reached out to them over Instagram and ended up meeting them at a show two nights later – my second night living in Oklahoma City, I met them. And we became friends quickly, started hanging out frequently and they soon pitched the idea of doing an album together.

And I was intrigued because it sounded impossible to pull off. I like trying things that are difficult, but it ended up being a pretty seamless process making the record. They’re very knowledgeable on music, far beyond just the kind of music they make.

To me, it was the process of making a record, but an act of just loving music. We write music as people almost like we’re discussing records we like through the music. So you hear all these different influences all happening at once. So it’s like a record-store album – own personal record store translated through a record.

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I want to return for a minute to your solo shows in this recent trek across Texas. Does performing these songs live in front of an audience change how you understand them or what they mean to you?

I guess in that one specific instance, it was someone who helped you realize that your songs might have been about something you didn’t even put together in the moment.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the times, too, my songs become the final song while on tour. I’ve had this happen, I’ve released a song on an album, and then I play it live so many times that the song changes, and I view the live version as the definitive version.

And that’s where I’m at right now, performing solo on these Texas dates, too, is right now I just feel like it’s the ultimate way to hear my music. I love my records, but I love performing live and telling stories. I tell stories a lot on stage. I’m inspired more by old-school entertainers, everyone from like Merle Travis to Buck Owens, this showmanship. And you tell a story; it’s not enough to just play the songs. And that’s a huge part of my show, it adds to the songs.

It’s a process of discovery playing live, of learning more about the songs every single night and the audience helps me dig deeper and find a lot of these things that I did not know. It’s my favorite way of making music and playing music, is these live shows. It’s my favorite.

Well, I don’t mean to keep returning to this, but I’m a little struck by how you are done with your hometown. And I remember you ran for city council several years back; there’s actually a movie about that.

Do you think it’s just that you’ve grown and you moved on, or is it about the Panhandle or is it about Texas in general? What else would you say?

I would say leaving Amarillo, the reason why I feel like I can’t return, is Amarillo provided me endless inspiration. I think it’s a very interesting place and there’s so much you can pull from it. But it’s place that I think you can only pull so much inspiration from it until you reach a point where there’s no longer inspiration.

And it can be dark. I mean, Amarillo is an island and it can be a black hole of sorts, especially if you’re an artist or a creative person. I won’t beat around the bush. I love Amarillo, but I have to be honest about the realities of it. It is not an art or music city, and it could be very lonely there, especially for me over the years.

I always joked that, why is Paris in my Spotify monthly top cities, but Amarillo never has been? And that was always the nature of it. I pulled the inspiration from there, but I had to recognize that it was not a place conducive to making art long term.

The best thing you can do with Amarillo is take what you can from it and get out before it starts taking from you.

Well a lot of Panhandle refugees have found themselves in Austin or in Dallas. Do you think it’s the nature of the High Plains that Oklahoma City felt like a more natural fit, or was there something going on there that that especially drew that to you?

Well, I think I’ve always liked Oklahoma City. I think it’s a very, very interesting city. It’s obviously quite a bit bigger than Amarillo, so there’s more to do, but it was a change of pace. I didn’t want to be recognized at the grocery store as the guy who ran for city council. You know, that’s kind of a tough thing where it’s like, sometimes I like to be private.

But Oklahoma City is far different than Austin because Austin’s kind of obviously a strange place, it’s different than the rest of Texas. But I liked Oklahoma City because it still has the elements of Amarillo I like. There’s something very modest and low-key and plain about it. And the people feel more like Amarillo people.

I still need that kind of down-to-earth normalcy of Amarillo, and a place like Oklahoma City still provides that, where maybe a place like Austin or Dallas or Houston, they wouldn’t really provide that feeling. They’re a bit too crazy for me.

I understand what you mean. You learned recently you’re gonna be a daddy. Do you wanna talk about that at all and maybe how that changes how you view your art?

Yeah, it’s so, so wild that me and my wife – we recently returned from a six-week tour of Europe. It was a very long, long tour, but a few weeks in, we found out my wife is pregnant. Very, very exciting.

But I mean, definitely a lot of feelings. You don’t expect to find that out while on tour, especially in Europe. And it was a crazy busy tour. And you’re too busy to even have a moment to sit down and fully process this huge life-changing thing.

And, you know, I’m still on tour right now. I’m currently in the middle of a seven-week run of the U.S. and Canada. So I’ve effectively been on tour from August all the way to Dec. 6, which is the final show. So this tour is strange because I’m playing songs from three albums that represent my 20s – essentially a decade span – while now I’m in my 30s, waiting to get home to what now feels like an entirely different life, new future waiting for me.

So I’m currently in this limbo between my two different worlds, my past and my future. I’m truly in-between them while on tour. So it’s a crazy feeling – very, very strange feeling – but it’s made me kind of lean further into these songs where I’m telling stories of who I used to be and where I’m from, while looking ahead to what’s to come and all of these exciting things.

Me and my wife are over the moon, so happy, but I’m not going to lie – I’m excited to get home and sit down in silence and process this. You know, I’m 31 years old and this is the first child me and wife will have. And it’s huge. But I haven’t even had a second to process how big this is.

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