There’s a staggering purity of tone to Hayden Pedigo’s six-string, with waifs and strays loitering at the end of odd bars in the form of plangent overtones which provide an undertow to these wistful and roving compositions. In the middle of his live set in his hometown of Amarillo, Texas – which was preserved for posterity last 23 December and comes with a dedication to his grandfather, signed with a ‘Merry Christmas’ – the guitarist delivered a few punchlines while revealing something about his approach:
When I’m on the road, I tell people that Amarillo is a flat, windy, hot, cold, brutal and somewhat ugly place to a lot of people. But I say, I think Amarillo is quite a beautiful place. The pauses in my music, the reason they’re there is in Amarillo, the flat plains that go on for ever and ever, they’ve always been refreshing to me, they feel like a giant, long pause. I’ve always felt like Amarillo’s city slogan should be “Amarillo, the long pause”. Another one was ‘Amarillo, not for beginners’. And then the other one was ‘Amarillo, playing life on hard mode’.
Those silences and those long, flat plains never labour as Pedigo unfolds a stark but variegated landscape. Through his guitar and via his onstage patter too he possesses a rare capacity for making fine and even pretty statements which sound totally unvarnished. With a couple of medleys, the songs on Live in Amarillo, Texas draw mostly from his past two albums, Letting Go and last year’s The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, whose title comes from a note penned by the National Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney shortly before his mysterious and untimely death. Schooled in primitive guitar, moments of the recording evoke Matthew J. Rolin’s more ragged and raga-inflected approach, the unsparing folk recuperations of Myriam Gendron and the sandstone Americana of Julian Lage, while as the album notes suggest, redoubtable classics such as Live at the Old Quarter by Townes Van Zandt and The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick by John Fahey lie well within Pedigo’s wiry reach.
