When John Fahey invented modern fingerstyle guitar as we know it, he created a paradox. His lonesome style of ghost-town music conjured a way of American life that never truly existed—a place in his mind where Delta blues, ragtime, bluegrass, and Indian raga all rose naturally from the ground. Ironically, by doing so, he ended up with a new, very real tradition: Generation after generation of artists have attempted to evoke his specific vision of the people who live on this land, fighting against the current of popular music as they chase his tumbleweed across the desert.

Perhaps even more so than the torchbearers that have inspired him, Hayden Pedigo has embraced the costume-like nature of this role. The Texas-bred fingerpicker has tended to shroud his soft, wilted music in a matrix of inside jokes and pranks. When he’s not running for local office or walking for Gucci, he’s making tongue-in-cheek instructional videos on how to play his songs, and posting ridiculous fit pics on his Instagram. He performs in brightly pigmented Western shirts and sky-high Stetsons, looking either the spitting image of Hank himself, or Woody from Toy Story depending how you squint. There’s a long history of absurd costumes in the country world, from Gram Parsons’ weed-covered Nudie suit to Robbie Basho’s cowboy duds to Blaze Foley wrapping his clothes up in duct tape. Until now, Pedigo has indulged in this sense of playacting, dressing the part of the old-world troubadour even as he waxes about how inspiring the early-’10s blog days were and declares the ultimate ambient Americana record to be James Ferraro’s gas-station reverie Last American Hero.

On I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away, Pedigo drops the smirk. Played with a powerful directness and dappled with rich arrangements, it’s his most majestic album yet, though he doesn’t accomplish it through epic, galloping melodies the way William Tyler might, nor through rugged textural exploration as Daniel Bachman would. Because Pedigo is concerned, above all, with the beauty in emptiness itself. “Even the flatness I love,” he’s said of his hometown of Amarillo—a muse that he defends in interviews as if it were a frowned-upon lover. “It makes you breathe a little bit better when you feel like you can see that far.”

Pedigo’s music, in turn, breathes. Building on the quiet, unflashy melancholy of 2021’s Letting Go and 2023’s The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored, his playing doesn’t aim for the jaw-dropping splendor of the Grand Canyon, but the small pit stop towns on the drive up. Striking an airy grace halfway between ECM and Windham Hill, Pedigo and producer Scott Hirsch’s arrangements are designed to create a sense of space. Piano notes trickle down the descending melody of “All the Way Across” like falling helicopter seeds, while vibraphone-like keys swirl around circular arpeggios on “Hermes,” dissolving the track into a liquid wash of color. Pedigo and Hirsch leave plenty of room for the little details to shine through, materializing as gradually as flecks of landscape passing in the window.

Written during an artist residency on a 20,000-acre ranch in Wyoming and recorded in the small, new-agey town of Ojai, Calif., these songs contain a newfound lushness, an O’Rourke-ian vibrancy that allows each instrument to express its particular tonalities to the fullest. “Long Pond Lily” commences the album on a warm, optimistic tone, decorating his autumnal riffs with phased-out electric hammer-ons beamed in straight from Up on the Sun, zipping up and down in playful jest. But the longer Pedigo plays, the more his songs descend into a misty daze. The reverbed opening notes of “Smoked” unveil a chasm of mellotron choirs that imbue Pedigo’s fingerpicking with an otherworldly dread, as if the spirits haunting his strings were coming to life.

I’ll Be Waving as You Drive Away takes its name from a particularly dark episode of Little House on the Prairie in which the family’s eldest daughter loses her eyesight bit by bit, eventually going completely blind. For an artist whose sense of irony has always put his work at arm’s length, Pedigo’s latest underlines the tension between its tragedies and absurdities by playing it totally sincere. On the front porch lament of “Houndstooth,” Pedigo steadily slows his picking to clear the way for folksy brushes of fiddle, their melody tenderly caressing his guitar. They might summon images of Oklahoma!, or perhaps some lost John Ford film, though it’s a little hard to put your finger on. It’s a pastiche of something from long ago, or maybe something that never was. But there it is, beckoning you back.