Letting Go [LP]

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