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Release Date

March 5th, 2021

Tracklist

1. High Tide on the Land Ocean 04:51

2. Dry Country Ramble 05:20

3. Fossil Water 06:03

4. Unclipt Wings 06:15

5. Tomorrow is the Song I Sing 04:41

6. A Drouth of Record 04:08

7. Windham Hill Summer Bangers 04:07 Format: CD / Digital C

Credits

Hayden Pedigo acoustic and electric guitar, banjo, synthesizer

Andrew Weathers acoustic guitar, banjo, synthesizer, electronics, piano, electric piano

Recorded at Hayden’s House, Amarillo, TX and Wind Tide, Littlefield, TX

Mixed and Mastered by AW Cover photo by Justin Rogers

Debacle Records
http://www.debaclerecords.com/
DBL113

When I lived in California, I spent a lot of time in my car. Not just because the traffic is bad and we don’t really have a public transportation infrastructure in this country, but also because there was a lot of ground to cover. I may have not learned a lot from rock & roll, but I did learn that the spaces in between are where the real interesting stuff happens. I mean that aesthetically as well as literally. I was interested in what’s going on in Oakland but also what’s going on beyond that mountain pass somewhere in Inyo County on a road I can’t remember the name of. Some of the most transcendent experiences, most vivid memories of my life happened on anonymous stretches of isolated road. Perfect mixtures of light, density, strata, time.

I’d use roadside attractions and outsider art as waypoints on the journies. Artful piles of junk in Trona, a Goodyear Gal somewhere on the east rim of Death Valley, a melting house made of glass bottles. Hours apart, unreasonable distances by most measures, but you learn a lot on the journey. This interest isn’t really something that you can talk about with anybody. Sure, a lot of folks know about Salvation Mountain & maybe have even made a trip out there. But how many folks know to stop at the International Banana Museum & grab a bananas foster milkshake on the way in? Not everybody wants to spend their weekends in a dusty room filled with banana memorabilia. Like most of my pursuits, driving and seeking out these sites is a way out of mass produced media and entertainment, a brief respite from the crush of capitalism. But it’s not for everybody, anything for everybody isn’t for me. I’d wager that if you’re reading this, printed in a booklet accompanying a CD on a boutique label releasing strange and interesting music, the same probably goes for you.

In my mind, there’s not a specific Big Tex. There’s the skinny Big Tex on the cover of this album, overlooking the highway Hayden and I drive between Littlefield and Amarillo. There’s the Big Tex on the billboards tempting me to try to eat a four and a half pound steak when I get to Amarillo. I stopped in once, driving the entirety of I-40 before I moved to Texas, intending to eat the thing. There’s just no way. You have to eat it with all the fixins in under an hour. There’s the Big Tex at the Texas State fair that I’ve never gone to and probably never will. There’s even a Big Tex at a tourist trap on the 101 north of Arcata. I make a point to stop just to look up at him, even if I’m driving through in the middle of the night. If you catch him during business hours, he’ll talk to you from fifteen feet up.

When I think about expressing the appeal of out of the way places, I think about Terry Allen. Lubbock’s favorite son, if you haven’t heard of Buddy Holly. The poetry of his song Amarillo Highway appeals to a lot of folks who wouldn’t be caught dead driving the highway between Lubbock and Amarillo. If you haven’t been through Tulia or Plainview, what can that tune mean to you then? It reads as fiction, but it’s not. Kind of like that style of photography that portrays these small towns as empty and decaying, denying the actual complexity of those places. West Texas : No Country for Big City Bozos. Let it remain fiction, live out your no callous cowpoke fantasies in Marfa, but let West Texas be. What I find most moving about Hayden’s work is his relentless insistence on Amarillo’s cultural validity without it being an open invitation. That’s the potent overlap between us, not our shared interest in a niche approach to the acoustic guitar. I’ve been lucky to have been welcomed in by West Texas.

I’m not really interested in explaining anything, but I’m interested in living within something. I do music alone, I do music with my friends, that’s the part of my life that’s accessible to other people. But I just think it’s all the same thing - Big Tex, the road, doing drywall in my house, playing guitar, hanging out with Hayden. If I’m not cultivating the good things around me, rejecting the parts of this world that I’m coerced into participating in, how good can the music that I make end up being?

- Andrew Weathers