In this FRONTPAGE interview, the ‘West Texas Balenciaga’ (as dubbed by a fan) chats about music, pranks, and personal style.
It’s just after 9 a.m. in Amarillo, Texas, and Hayden Pedigo is sitting in his charming kitchen: the cupboards are painted turquoise and there’s a Gumby clock amidst an eclectic collection of framed artwork. The musician whose enigmatic internet presence may be as famous as his music and in part because of his wild theater-meets-cowboy couture ensembles, is wearing a white T-shirt, black-rimmed glasses, and a baseball cap. We’re here because he’s about to embark on a long-awaited summer tour.
Hayden Pedigo released his sixth studio album The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored at the end of June. The title comes from Doug Kenney, co-founder of National Lampoon. It’s his “heaviest album emotionally.” Even so, the first two singles, “Elsewhere” and the title track, forefront his signature soundscapes of finger-picked acoustic guitar with the added ambiance of synthesisers, much like his back discography. Those obsessed with technique can get stuck on the quality of his guitar playing. Pedigo is often folded into the American primitive guitar genre, formed by steel-string guitarist John Fahey. Pedigo’s playing, both artful and technically sound, has become increasingly singular in the genre, but he doesn’t want to be known as just a good guitar player. That’s “insanely boring” he says. And it’s true — there’s a whole lot more to him than elegant finger picking.
It doesn’t take much digging to discover the dynamic, multimodal artist-jokester behind Pedigo’s gentle guitar-forward music. For example: just look at his Instagram. See the photo of him with Gucci’s former creative director Alessandro Michele. See another of Pedigo on the Gucci runway (in a bright yellow jumpsuit), or the ongoing series of Pedigo in outlandish, thrifted outfits, posing in front of obscure local landmarks — a real estate billboard, a Red Lobster franchise, “The Ether Store.”
Then there’s his 2019 City Council run, which started as a joke with Tim & Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job!-esque videos (that wound up featured on Adult Swim) and ended with him losing to the incumbent candidate. A T-shirt he made for the campaign encapsulates the intention behind the project – “How to Win a City Election in Amarillo, Texas. Be Old. Be White. Be Wealthy. That’s it. Good Luck.”
About two years ago, he made business cards that read: “Avant-garde Musician / Politician / Performance Artist.” It’s in jest, but only partly. “I feel like I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is that I do,” he tells me when I ask if he might skip any of those descriptors these days. “I feel like I've been all over the place.”
It starts with his childhood, really. He was homeschooled, and at the age of 11 asked his parents for guitar lessons. His access to music was limited, there was no internet at home, so all he had were the CDs at his local library in Amarillo, Texas. He learned finger-picking from a John Fahey CD. Pedigo describes his early music taste as “pretty warped” — a spectrum anchored on each end by jazz guitar player Wes Montgomery and rock prankster Frank Zappa. Warped, maybe, but foundational to an eclectic palette, definitely.
When the internet was finally available at home, Pedigo eventually came across blogs like Mutant Sounds where the “furthest-out experimental music imaginable” was made available for download. Particularly important were the many LPs recommended by Nurse with Wound, the 1970s and ‘80s noise group, as well as the albums they’d listed as inspiration on the back of one of their own records.
And the deeper Pedigo went into the experimental music rabbit hole, the more advanced his technical skills got.
Pedigo spent his teens and twenties contacting creative heroes, making connections and even sometimes collaborating. On his roster are comedians Tom Green and Tim Heidecker, as well as Lubbock musician and visual artist Terry Allen, who contributed to his record Greetings from Amarillo and wrote a foreword to his 2021 album Letting Go.
It’s homeschooling that Pedigo credits for his precocious behavior and a desire to connect with people who inspire him to this day. “I became very self-sufficient. And I feel like I followed all the ideas and creative urges I had because I didn't have any friends, I didn't have peers, I didn't go around anybody,” he explains. Sometimes he emailed his heroes, though at least once he went so far as to rent a billboard to grab the attention of filmmaker Harmony Korine. Pedigo was about 25 at the time and wanted the filmmaker to visit his hometown. It worked — Korine called him on the phone.
The first Hayden Pedigo album, Seven Years Late, was released on limited-edition cassette in 2013, and recorded when he was between the ages of 16 to 18. The music garnered attention on certain niche blogs. Then, in a move that’s become something of a Pedigo hallmark, he called in a pitch of the album to Texas Monthly from his car. He was working at a bank at the time, he was on a lunch break. The call landed him a feature in the magazine. Ever since, Pedigo has occupied a cult-favorite space in the experimental, instrumental folk landscape.
Pedigo worked with Hundred Waters’ Trayer Tryon on the production of Letting Go (“Letting Go was like my THX 1138,” says Pedigo, “You have to make that before you can make Star Wars”). Two years later came The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored. “I’m taking all the ingredients from Letting Go. I'm just doing it better.”
And he can’t be rushed.
His music-making rituals are strict, bordering on absurdly so. The house has to be completely clean. There can be no plans on the social calendar. He works on one song at a time and doesn’t practice guitar outside of preparing for performances. If nothing really happens a few minutes after picking up his instrument, he puts it away. “When I'm working on music, it feels like fishing. I'll sit there with a guitar and I'll start messing with something and I'm just following a feeling. If it feels right, I continue following it.”
“I'm dead serious about what I do,” he continues, “but I'm willing to make fun of things that I do and make fun of the genres I work in. I think that's completely okay. I think that makes better work, when you're willing to make fun of it.”
When he’s not composing music or challenging local politicians with ads so good they end up on Adult Swim, the ever-evolving multi-hyphenate has a penchant for putting together looks and curating a high-fashion editorial aesthetic on Instagram. The “West Texas Balenciaga,” as one Instagram commenter once put it, Pedigo refers to his personal style as “sleek, mixed in with idiotic things.”
His wife L’Hannah also helps him pull looks together. “My wife works in theater, so at times we've had access to costume houses. That's where you get a lot of the really weird stuff, like Victorian and renaissance.” Another frequent collaborator is the Fashion Brand Company, the sarcastic, playful Los Angeles-based clothier (see: the cowboy-inspired Swiss Cheese ensemble worn by Pedigo in an Instagram photo in front of Donut Depot).
The Gucci connect came when a casting agent took notice of his unique ensembles and sent him a DM on Instagram. Ending up in his “other” folder, Pedigo initially thought the messages were a scam, and referred them to his record label, Mexican Summer. Soon after, Mexican Summer confirmed their legitimacy, and Pedigo was on his way to LA for what he thought was just a casting. Turns out, Gucci already wanted him on the runway, and a few days after meeting the team, he walked in the Gucci 100th Anniversary Love Parade show on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “It was unreal because I went from doing the dumbest thrift store junk and having no experience in fashion,” he said, still awestruck. “I had never been to a fashion show. I had never done anything in fashion.”
In his everyday life Pedigo is a white T-shirt and jeans guy; he’s a “minimalist. Non-existent.” Nonexistent or refined, his latest work seems ample proof that Hayden Pedigo has reached a summit of sagacity and wit, balancing melancholy with a well-timed wink. “I feel like I'm finally finding that balance of comedy and tragedy,” he says, “irony and sincerity, where it's finally blending in a way that feels right.”
