Hayden Pedigo on Bladee, Working With Chat Pile, and Giving It All You've Got

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

Last year, musician-slash-writer-slash-certified Friend of the Newsletter Colin Joyce texted me and said, "You should interview Hayden Pedigo for the newsletter." As it so happens, right around the time I was queueing up new interview subjects, Hayden's gorgeous and really stunning new album I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away hit my inbox, so the timing couldn't have been any more perfect. The resulting convo with Hayden was energizing and fascinating; as someone who talks to a lot of musicians, when you speak to someone with his level of focus and clarity of purpose it's actually a literal shock to the system. I've been looking forward to publishing this one for a while, check it out:

How long have you lived in Oklahoma City for?
I moved here last summer because I didn't really plan on staying in the Texas Panhandle or Amarillo. I've always liked Oklahoma City. It's only three and a half hours away from families, so it's easy to go see people but still have some distance away from the Texas Panhandle—and it's really cheap here.

What else do you like about Oklahoma City?
It's a really beautiful, unique city. I like the music here. I think people don't realize how much cool stuff is going on in the music scene here. I became really good friends with Chat Pile when I moved here and made a record with them immediately, which is pretty crazy. I feel like I was very accepted right when I moved here.

Tell me more about that record you made with Chat Pile.
I followed them on Instagram right before I moved here, and when I moved here I started talking to the bass player, Austin. It was weird—we just started all hanging out, then they came to me with this idea to do a collaborative album, and I was very much down to do it. I can't give away too much about it now, but it's definitely a completed album that's coming.

What do you think it is about you and them that clicks creatively?
Our approaches are startlingly similar. Both of us have always had this extra-zoomed-in look at where we're from, and our music is definitely inspired by landscapes and environments. They're very knowledgeable in music, far beyond the kind of stuff they make. We were attracted by the idea because we had no idea how it would turn out, and it challenged us to go way outside of our comfort zone. It ended up working out beautifully because all of us were flexible and willing to try new things.

Going back to adventurous music tastes beyond the type of music one makes—you cited Bladee's Cold Visions in the press bio as a recent influence. Tell me more about that.
The influence goes back way further than just Bladee. When I was in high school making music, Tyler the Crater and Odd Future were blowing up and I was very much plugged into that world. They had more to do with how I approached music than anything in American primitive guitar. For the longest time, I've always been attracted to music that has—I don't know if I'd say an explosive personality, but anything that has the feeling of a major statement filtered through experimental approaches, people that are visionary artists with a with a taste for the avant-garde. Yeezus came out, and that was a huge deal for me. I make these little guitar albums, but I'm still wanting to aim for that sort of thing.

So I heard Cold Visions, and obviously James Ferraro worked on it—all of those weird sound effects. He goes way back for me in terms of listening to the Skaters and his early work. I'm always attracted to those outsider visionaries that make grand statements, because if you're going to do something that's avant-garde or experimental, I still like the idea of approaching it as a major statement. Not in a pop sense, but you can tell on a record when someone's going for it and making a bold statement. They fully intended for this record to be a major thing, and that's what I was going for with my new record. Obviously, it's not as experimental or damaged as Cold Visions. Actually, my record feels, in some ways, like a very straightforward record—but there's this tiny, psychedelic, eerie undercurrent.

My problem with this post-genre music world we live in is that people that make music where you can tell they're inspired by a bunch of stuff. Most of the time, it's not good music, in my opinion—and it really harms the music. I think you should have varied listening taste, but I don't think it's a good thing to hear that listening taste in your music. I hate when I listen to someone's album and I can hear that they listen to a ton of music. We're over-influenced, and that's why I try to be careful with my music. I'm inspired by Bladee, but I'm not going to do anything in the record that's going to sound like that.

This record was influenced by a very specific Little House on the Prairie episode. Tell me more about that.
I was revisiting the show a lot while writing the album—but for me, Little House on the Prairie is super-foundational. I was a homeschooled kid. My dad was a pastor who lived out in the country in Amarillo. I watched a lot of that show as a kid. If people haven't seen that show, I recommend they do. It's very, very strange. It's very wholesome, traditional entertainment, but there's this weird, menacing undercurrent where there's all these strange things that make you wonder, "Why did they put this in the show?"

It's a disturbing show at certain points, and it stood out to me for years—always stuck with me. I revisited the show again as an adult and really enjoyed it. But the episode "I'll Be Waiting As You Drive Away" was such a phenomenal episode, excellent writing. I think it was Emmy-nominated and considered one of the best episodes of TV ever made. That episode specifically was so emotionally moving for me, and the timing was interesting because I chose the album title at the same time I was leaving Amarillo for good, so it had this double meaning behind it.

The cover is a painting of me in a truck, and behind me is a painted-sign version of me waving and wearing this very dramatic, over-the-top suit—and I'm dressed in plain clothes in the truck leaving. It wasn't on purpose, but it feels like the current version of myself is getting in the car and leaving as the previous version painted on the sign is waving. I'm shedding these skins and environments, and the constant state of leaving that we're all in, in some way. It's deeply tragic and heavy, but also it's starting something new and it's exciting.

How did you feel leaving Amarillo?
I felt great. It's a place that has very much inspired me over the years, and it still does, but it's not an easy place to live. If you try to do something different in Amarillo, it's going to be an uphill battle, and you might not always get support. For the most part, you won't. It was challenging, and I felt like I'd done everything I'd ever wanted to do in that town. I recorded a live album at the Globe News Center—the home of the Amarillo Symphony—and 500 people came, and it felt like the validation I always wanted. But I think it was good that I left after that.
I got what I needed, but don't push your luck and get out before it gets dark, because it does get dark.

I want to talk more about Jonathan Phillips' artwork, which is very striking to me and a really nice pairing with what you do musically. Talk to me about what that creative partnership is like.
He's a very old and great friend of mine from Amarillo—one of my best friends, one of my favorite artists ever. I'm kind of calling him out, but he frustratingly doesn't make much art. It's really hard to get him to paint. But he always did these covers for me without question, and they're all amazing. Each one got better, and this final one is the best one. He just captures something so perfect, strange, sad, funny—he captures Amarillo. I was honored that he did these covers, and this was the last one because it's closing out this series, so there's a sadness of losing his artwork.

Ending this trilogy is weird. I understand it's necessary—we've told the story—but a lot of my musical identity with these records has come from these covers. It's this thing I could rely on, knowing there's this throughline through the work—that's really comforting. But this is the end of the trilogy, and the end of him doing these covers. I'm very sad about it, but I'm honored he did them. They're perfect.

Talk to me more about what inspires you creatively when it comes to visual art.
It's such a tricky thing for me. I'm kind of weird about what inspires me. I'll go long periods of time not even consuming much art—disconnecting from everything. A lot of times, the only thing that inspires me is literally going for a walk, or sitting in silence for a long time. It sounds bad, but the older I get, the less I want to take in of everything. I'm severely limiting myself on how much I'm taking in.

I don't mean to get too doom-y, but I'm kind of overwhelmed with how much stuff there is. This is why I take long periods of time without creating any art and limiting how much media I consume. I have to take a big reset before I start feeling creative. I'm not a constantly creative person. There's some people that work that way, but I'm not. I pause everything.

In your Tiny Desk Concert, you mentioned that you quit your job as an attendance clerk in a high school back in 2021. Tell me more about what that job was like.
That was a very weird job. I was living in Lubbock, Texas deep into the pandemic. We moved there because my wife was going to school. I'd worked at banks for nearly 10 years, and I was so tired of working at banks that I just got a random job at a high school as an attendance clerk. It was the same high school Terry Allen went to back in the day, which was interesting—but it was not for me. I did it from January to the summer, and then I signed with Mexican Summer while I was an attendance clerk there. I remember I signed the contract with Mexican Summer at work and scanned it on the workplace copier at the school, and no one knew about. I wasn't telling co-workers or anything, I was just doing my little job.

I'm gonna say this really quick: The paraprofessional positions at high schools don't pay enough. I'm not joking—that job paid a thousand dollars a month. Luckily, me and my wife were fine, because she was getting money for school—but there were women in their 40s with kids working these attendance clerk jobs and talking about how they were just barely getting by, and I was like, "Yeah, they're only paying a thousand dollars a month for a full-time job." It just blows me away that they expected people to live off that.

How has it been making music full-time, financially speaking?
It's been great. It's the reason why my music has gotten so much better—because I've been able to devote time to it. I'm lucky that people have been listening to the music and playing it, that's helped a ton. When I worked at banks, I had the experience of waking up at five in the morning every day, leaning over the bathtub to wash my hair—because you have to get your hair looking nice and put on slacks and a buttoned-up shirt—and that process took a toll on me mentally. When I worked bank jobs, I was always on my computer secretly researching music and record labels. I definitely sent demos to labels during work—which, I probably shouldn't have been, but I used the time to my advantage.

I also knew I didn't have much longer in me to do that. I felt the pressure of it, and it was really hitting me hard. That's why I made the record Letting Go, which got me signed to Mexican Summer. In 2020, I was working at a bank in Lubbock—a cubicle job. I'd worked at this job for two months and I just suddenly was like, "What am I doing? This is not where your life is supposed to be." I texted my wife and asked her if I could quit my job so I could write a record, and she texted back and said, "Do it." I turned in my notice, I went home and wrote Letting Go, I got signed to Mexican Summer, and it changed my life. I had to take a major risk, but it was because I was about to lose it. I reached a breaking point and couldn't do it.

As your listener base has increased, do you feel like you've faced any misconceptions regarding who you are?
Yes and no. I'll give myself credit—I think I've been pretty good in telling my own story and navigating people in the direction I want them to go. I was known for a long time for doing certain things—running for city council, funny photos—and I made the decision to slowly move in a different direction and give it to people incrementally. I'm not just one day telling people, "I'm not funny anymore—I'm a musician and that's it." That doesn't really work well with people. But I gradually shifted, where I think people do really engage with these records in a way I want them to, because I think they're designed to be engaged with that way, and I think they're good records.

I feel like I've done a pretty good job on setting a certain narrative with this music. People know I treat it very seriously, but ultimately I think people listen to the records and they like the records—and what you have to do is make good records, and the rest will work itself out.

Yeah, going back to your viral moments earlier in your career, I was definitely wondering if you ever felt boxed in as a result.
It never got bad, but I saw the writing on the wall that it could become a problem. Luckily, for a long time I had a lot of people tell me, "I followed you because of this one goofy photo of you in front of a Walmart, and then I found out that you did music and now I've been listening to you for two years now." That was the goal for a long time. But I reached a certain point where I didn't really want to be growing my following from goofy photos. I needed to make the transition where people finally know me as a musician—they buy the records and they support what I do.

I got older, and my taste changed—and what I want to do changes. Taking goofy photos, I reached the natural end to that, and a huge thing for me is listening to your gut and knowing when something is over. Never push your luck, because it's really easy to burn people out and get annoying. I'm a lot more intentional now on what I'm sharing. I fought for a long time to get people to listen to my music and get labels to pay attention to me, and I felt like I was fighting nonstop for 10 years. Now I'm at a spot where, it's not that I'm giving up promoting my music, but I'm done fighting. I made a really good record, and if people want to listen to it, they will. If they don't listen to it, that's fine—but you can't fight to get them to listen to it, because it's not where I'm at in life, and I feel like I'm already pushing myself so hard.

I will say that this current record is the best thing I've ever done. The problem is, over the past two records I keep saying, "This album's the best thing I've ever done." But the truth of it is, I think I keep making better records, so unfortunately I keep having to say it—because the quality keeps improving.

Tell me more about why you think this is your best record yet.
The reason this one's the best songs is because they were the hardest songs to play when it came to the recording. With Scott Hirsch, everything was done with intention. We were laser-focused in the studio, there was no wasted time. The vision for the record was so concrete that we knew what it was I wanted, and Scott helped me actualize that sound.

The thing is, I am very much a student of the kind of music I make. I'm inspired by things like Cold Visions, but I listen to every single instrumental guitar record that comes out. I pay attention to what everyone's doing. I'm not saying I treat music like sports, but it's like Brad Pitt in Moneyball, looking at the stats. I know what makes a good record. It's not paint-by-numbers, but I set out to make a record as good or better than Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing. That's what I'm aiming for. Anything less than that, to me, is a waste of time. I'm trying to make something that is the best album in this genre—that's the goal, and with this record I think I did that, because the writing and the recording quality is this maximalist, big-screen take. I approach it the same way Tyler the Creator does. When he makes records, he's trying to make the best thing, and you can tell when people are aiming to do that.

I don't make albums to put out an album. I make an album to be like, "This is going to be the best thing I've ever made." Otherwise, I just wasted everyone's time, including my own. I've made records in the past, pre-Mexican Summer, that I wasn't proud of—but I was using Garageband and working bank jobs. Now's the time where, if I'm gonna quit my job, then I need to be sure that I'm really coming through with something good. And this new record, I think, is beautiful. It's just just glowing. It's the one.

Something that stuck out to me in the press materials was you describing an artist retreat that you went on as severe and intense. Whenever I hear a writer talk about going on a retreat, I feel like I'm always hearing, "Oh my God, it was so nice to be out of the city, there was nature," blah blah blah. It's very rare that I hear somebody come back from one of those things being like, "I dug in, ripped my guts out, and got shit done." For you, it sounds like one of those rare instances where the retreat was time actually well spent.
That's funny—I knew people on the same residency that were doing over a month, hiking and fishing and taking naps and enjoying the scenery. Which, depending on what they were doing, that's perfectly fine. But, for me, I only had two weeks. There wasn't nature hikes, there wasn't fishing, there wasn't swimming. I was locked up in this dead silent house by myself—it wasn't even attached to the writers, they were all living together in this giant compound. I was off in this composer's studio by myself, so I wasn't getting much of the social interaction everyone else was.

I had two weeks, and it was like, "I'm here to write. I have to write a good record." It was scary. The silence was really tripping me out, because it was so quiet. Multiple days, I was crying, and I couldn't figure out why. It was really strange. I called my parents and was like, "Yeah, I've been crying every day. I don't know what's going on." I realized that the level of silence in this house was unreal, and this sounds like such a blanket statement, but our current world does not allow us to have exposure to that type of silence—where, when we do have exposure to it, it's terrifying and really emotional. So I was dealing with that, crying from the silence, and writing—and it worked out really well. It's like I was a shaken-up Coke bottle, where there was this pressure and I was about to explode.

I knocked out the whole record and went home to pack up our house to leave.
It felt like everything in my life was going through the paper shredder,
but it was totally necessary. I was uncomfortable, and it was like I had to be miserable to make this thing happen.

I'm not drawing a 1:1 with regards to what I do and what you do, but I will say that I recognize that feeling of being creatively wasted. Whenever I finish a project that I really care about and really want to be good, at the end of it, I'm just like, "Wow, I feel like shit." Then you recover and get some space and time, and you're like, "Alright, I think I did a good job here."
Well, that's the thing—right now I've recently been feeling like giving up completely. That sounds ridiculous, because it's like I told my wife yesterday—I said, "I made the best record I've ever made. I made this great album with Chat Pile, and I feel like giving up more than ever." And she was like, "Well, it's because you gave everything." That's the cost of going all-in on a project, or your art:
On the other side of it, you gave everything. You're completely drained, and it's gonna take time to build that back up. I have to be gentle with myself, because I want so much from this music—I want to make this beautiful thing—but there's a cost to making stuff like this, emotionally, that I'm still trying to figure out. And it
only gets harder.