Amarillo Musician Pays Homage to His Hometown

Hayden Pedigo is performing a live set against a film about the Yellow Rose of Texas.

By Michael MarksOctober 20, 2016 11:31 am

The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.

It’s Thursday, and time for the final installment of our series “Cut In,” featuring new music from Texas artists. This week, writer Lyndsay Knecht introduces us to 22-year-old Amarillo native Hayden PedigoHe plays live to a video portrait of his hometown called “Greetings from Amarillo.”

Hayden Pedigo’s recorded output is, among other things, a sonic psychic travel guide to Amarillo,” she says. “The presence of the only nuclear weapons assembly plant in the country, the quiet of the plains – Pedigo can articulate the ominous and the pastoral with his guitar, synthesizer and field recordings.”

Here’s “Five Steps,” the titular track from his 2014 album.

In 2015, Texas Monthly’s Michael Hall wrote that Pedigo was making the most “innovative, audacious” music in America. 

“Media artist Chip Lord is known for his experimental treatment of place,” Knecht says. “Lord’s visual homage to the largest city in the Panhandle is making the festival circuit, with Pedigo accompanying live, as the two present their vision of the city together.” 

You can purchase tickets to the Dallas performance of “Greetings from Amarillo” here.




A former tour bus of Willie Nelson’s is up for sale once again. The bus, built in 1983, is called the “Me and Paul” bus after Nelson’s long-time drummer, Paul English.

“I guess Nashville was the roughest, but I know I’ve said the same about them all. We received our education in the cities of the nation, me and Paul,” Nelson says. 

The current owners bought the bus in 2014. Since then they’ve rented it out for events. Michael Tashnick represents them.

“They’d already used it a lot, and felt like it needed to get out on the road again,” he says, “let some other people enjoy it.”

You can check out the bus here. The current bid is $75,500.




The number of registered voters in Texas is even higher than initially thoughtThe Secretary of State’s office announced Wednesday that over 15 million people are registered to vote – 85,000 voters more than the office’s preliminary estimates from last week.

The office said there was a last-minute surge in applications ahead of the October 11 deadline. That brings the total percentage of eligible registered voters to 78 percent, up from 75 percent in 2012.