more from
Mexican Summer
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Letting Go

by Hayden Pedigo

/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $9.99 USD  or more

     

  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    12” black vinyl comes in a paper inner sleeve, housed in a full color jacket. DL card included.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Letting Go via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 3 days
    Purchasable with gift card

      $24.99 USD or more 

     

  • Limited Edition Texan Sunset Vinyl
    Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    12” Texan Sunset vinyl, limited to 250 copies, comes in a paper inner sleeve, housed in a full color jacket. DL card included. While supplies last, the record will also ship with a limited edition Hayden Pedigo postcard including words by Terry Allen.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Letting Go via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • Hayden Pedigo Yellow T-shirt
    T-Shirt/Apparel

    Yellow Gildan t-shirt, hand-printed by Beezer Printing in Brooklyn, NY.

    Sold Out

  • Letting Go - 'Official Artist Edition' Compact Disc
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Finally – in a world of low quality bootleg offerings, the first and only official compact disc version of Hayden Pedigo's 'Letting Go' longplayer has arrived – sanctioned by the man himself! Hotly anticipated for over eight dog years, this is glass-mastered compact disc perfection, housed in an artisan hand stamped recycled paper chipboard sleeve. Each copy includes a randomly selected wallet-ready photo of Hayden cast in one of his infamous ensembles, gorgeously replicated by the oldest analog 'diamond scan' photo lab in Texas. You bet it's in an edition that's strictly limited! Find it on Bandcamp, or on the road, or nowhere at all – Letting Go on CD is here today!

    Includes unlimited streaming of Letting Go via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

    Sold Out

  • Letting Go Anniversary T-Shirt
    T-Shirt/Shirt

    LAST REMAINING SHIRTS! Available in MEDIUM and XL only. Printed by VGKids of Ypsilanti, MI on Gildan SoftStyle Medium Weight shirts.

    Sold Out

1.
Carthage 05:30 video
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

about

Hayden Pedigo has put together a quiet monster he calls 'Letting Go'.
It was recorded in a secret studio in Littlefield, Texas, the birthplace of Waylon Jennings. This music does not seem probable coming out of that flatland world…the hard geography of the Texas Panhandle.

But that’s exactly where it comes from.
This music inside of Hayden grew up in Amarillo and has moved right along with him down to Lubbock.

But don’t let that fool you… it is its very own world.

There is a unique motion and sprawl running through all these songs. Like being in a nice car easy rolling through a beautiful night with a big full moon. It takes you straight inside yourself…listening to your own blood veins and nervous system streaming through your living body all at once.

It probably violates a lot of Good Ol’ Boy expectations.

It makes room for itself in a lot of places you haven’t even considered.

That is exactly why it is important.

-Terry Allen, 2021

...

The only thing you can ever really expect from Hayden Pedigo is the unexpected. The son of a truck stop preacher, raised and home-schooled in a "super religious family" (his own words), the acoustic guitarist and soundscape composer from Amarillo, Texas, has an unlikely origin story. After releasing a series of solo albums, the most unanticipated plot twist in his multiverse came in 2019 with an endearing bid for Amarillo City Council at the age of 25, following his Harmony Korine-inspired spoof campaign video that went viral. The whole story was brought to the big screen in Jasmine Stodel’s 2021 SXSW-premiering documentary Kid Candidate, which followed Pedigo on the campaign trail as he became the unsuspecting folk hero in a hopeful tale of integrity, corruption, and small city politics.

Pedigo's music is as equally enchanting as his backstory, combining the American Primitive guitar picking styles of John Fahey with a proclivity for experimental sound design and manipulation. Conceived and written on the 27-year-old’s porch, his new album Letting Go came about after he left his beloved hometown during the COVID pandemic to move to Lubbock, Texas, where he currently lives with his wife. However, moving down the dusty panhandle from the comfort blanket of Amarillo wasn’t the easiest. "I felt absolutely lost and had a heavy heart for months upon arriving in Lubbock," shares Pedigo. "I wanted to write a new album, but I was scared it wouldn’t turn out okay. I wanted to talk to my family again [after temporarily losing touch] and try to reconnect and heal despite our differences, but I was scared it wouldn’t turn out okay. The isolation made me reconsider a lot of things, and start making music again and working things out with my family."

Letting Go is very much a modern album of looking out, backwards, upwards and in; the songs forged by the upheaval brought on by Pedigo’s move and the subsequent reckoning with his upbringing. "I was home-schooled and lived in the middle of nowhere in Amarillo," he describes. "So it drove me to create my own world and sent me down a rabbit hole of strange music”. By his early twenties, Pedigo had already collaborated with acoustic and electronic musical luminaries such as Charles Hayward (This Heat), Fred Frith, Werner "Zappi" Diermaier (Faust), Stephen Basho Junghans, Chuck Johnson, Danny Paul Grody, and outlaw country legend Terry Allen (in an uncanny twist of fate, he works at the same school in Lubbock that Allen—who is now a kind of dream pen pal to Pedigo—used to attend.) He also curated the 2015 solo guitar compilation Imaginational Anthem, Vol. 7 for Tompkins Square Records.

Formative releases on Joel Ford’s Driftless Recordings and a handful of good-natured cold emails eventually led Pedigo to Mexican Summer in March 2021. In making Letting Go—his first album for the label—Pedigo was recapturing the relationship he’d had to music growing up. ”I wanted to return to the mindset of escape, like John Fahey’s records did for me at 15 years old. I wanted to fall in love with music again while reconciling with my past and learning to forgive and let go."

Pedigo recorded the album in Littlefield, Texas (a tiny town 45 minutes outside of Lubbock, best known for being the birthplace of Waylon Jennings), with his friend, the underground composer Andrew Weathers. "On the first day, Andrew set up the mics and I recorded each guitar piece live as a solo composition one after another – each take was live, no overdubs. I got the idea from Leo Kottke’s 1969 record 6- and 12-String Guitar, where he recorded each piece live in one take,” he explains. “On the next two dates, we recorded overdubs and fleshed out the solo guitar pieces with ambience, bass, field recordings, and pedal steel. But we wanted to ensure the record still felt like a solo guitar record."

Following Kottke’s influence through to 1971’s Mudlark, Pedigo brought in some like-minded musicians to contribute and fill out the songs, including pedal steel player Luke Schneider and Rich Ruth on synthesizer. Their contributions—like all the other overdubs—work to add weight and heft to Pedigo’s moves, never detracting or calling attention to themselves, but helping shape the songs to something higher. "Forgiveness was a big part of the record," he elaborates, "and I think that’s why the album has a brighter, uplifting feel threaded throughout."

The result is a mesmerising work of profound beauty. Stripped of some of the ambience that had filled the soundscapes of his previous albums, the guitar playing on Letting Go stands alone, stark and highly melodic, lonesome and ghostly, evoking a sense of absence and longing. Wordless melodies weave in and out of compositions where the interstices can be as affecting as the notes themselves. Pedigo’s fingers pick a path between Fahey’s slow introspection and young Kottke’s joyous struts, coming to a sound more in line with William Ackerman’s early works.

The influences on display throughout Letting Go move beyond the Takoma school, however; Pedigo has a light thumb, and his airy playing borders on the celestial. The stillness and gentle drift of Brian Eno’s ambience are hinted at on album closer “I Wasn’t Dreaming,” while John Renbourn’s stately phrasing can be heard on “Something Absolute.” Pedigo cites the progressive classical playing of Anthony Phillips on the early Genesis records as a point of reference for the album’s ethereal opener, “Carthage.”

Varied as his inspirations are, it’s important to always expect the unexpected from Pedigo. He names Earl Sweatshirt as his biggest influence on the record, in terms of its formatting, concise nature, and desire to dissolve the parameters of its genre label. Outside of music, he references Korine and the director’s ability to create something from nothing, as well as comedian Tom Green, whom Pedigo deems a visionary with supreme artistic sensibilities. As a sworn hater of the term "Cosmic Country" and with album artwork that depicts black metal connotations, Pedigo’s anything-goes sense of humor extends from the ingenious campaign videos through to the various characters he portrays on his Instagram page, and into every fiber of his being.

Letting Go takes open-hearted moments of solitude, confusion, longing, and acceptance and sends them skywards, where they refract and sun dance into our ears. Like William Tyler, Marisa Anderson, Chuck Johnson or any of the new wave of guitarists altering the very DNA of American guitar music for a new generation, Pedigo’s songs aren’t so much here to bring you into his world as to illuminate and color your own. With Letting Go, Hayden Pedigo proves he has already become such a painter. And that’s just about the best thing you can do with a guitar.

credits

released September 24, 2021

All songs written by Hayden Pedigo
Additional arrangements by Andrew Weathers
Recorded at Wind Tide (Littlefield, TX) October-December, 2020
Engineered, Produced, and Mixed by Andrew Weathers
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering (Bonn, Germany)

Hayden Pedigo - 6 & 12 string acoustic guitars, electric guitar, synthesizers
Cole Longanecker - synthesizers
David Menestres - upright bass
Brandon Perdue - drums
Michael Ruth - synthesizers
Luke Schneider - pedal steel
Blaine Todd - electric bass
Andrew Weathers - synthesizers, field recordings

All songs published by Ramada Trail Publishing (ASCAP)

Album cover painting by Jonathan Phillips
Layout by Bailey Elder

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Hayden Pedigo Amarillo, Texas

Hayden Pedigo is an acoustic guitarist and soundscape composer from Amarillo, Texas. Hayden spent his teen years woodshedding the American primitive guitar picking styles of John Fahey combined with experimental sound manipulation and by his early 20s he had already collaborated with luminaries such as Charles Hayward of This Heat, Fred Frith, Werner Diermaier of Faust and Terry Allen. ... more

shows

contact / help

Contact Hayden Pedigo

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

If you like Hayden Pedigo, you may also like: