Culture

Yes, Orville Peck‘s masks have been getting smaller and smaller lately. No, that is not an accident.
“For those who are very sleuthy, they’ll notice that I’ve actually been doing that from the beginning,” Peck tells Billboard. “I’ve slowly been changing out my masks and showing more of my face with each album. I think a change is good.”

That spirit helped the country crooner break out of his own box and create Stampede, his genre-spanning duets album featuring a parade of collaborators from across the music industry. The album’s first volume (released May 10 via Columbia Records) featured duets with legends like Willie Nelson and Elton John, as well as younger acts like Noah Cyrus, Allison Russell and Bu Cuaron.

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Each song on Volume 1 aimed to stretch the boundaries of Peck’s sonic universe, bringing new fusions to Peck’s classic country sound, including pop, rock, and in the case of “Miénteme” with Cuaron, Latin. “I never thought I would do a reggaeton track sung entirely in Spanish, but it’s what the song called for,” Peck says.

The goal, he explains, was not to create a curated, musically-cohesive album that would simply become “an Orville Peck album with a bunch of features.” Instead, Peck wanted Stampede to consist entirely of true collaborations:  “I wanted every single song to be a 50/50 collaboration between me and whoever the other artist is,” he explains. “People will see this especially with Volume 2 [due out later this year] — every song is entirely its own thing, because I wanted it to be like if me and whoever that other artist is had a musical baby.”

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While Peck has yet to set a release date for the second part of his album, the singer gave his fans a sneak peak of the forthcoming part two when he live debuted “Midnight Ride” at Outloud Fest at WeHo Pride alongside Kylie Minogue and Diplo. The song, which officially arrived on Friday (June 7), fulfills Peck’s promise of musical synthesis as he masterfully blends his swaggering sound with the dance-pop stylings of his collaborators.

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When telling Billboard about his new track, Peck says that the vision was clear from the beginning. “When we wrote ‘Midnight Ride,’ we knew we wanted to make a disco country banger,” he says. “Something that felt wild, free and dangerous“

Stampede has been gestating since Peck put out Show Pony, his glitzy 2020 EP that featured his first major collaboration with country legend Shania Twain on “Legends Never Die.” The now-36-year-old artist knew that an album of A-list duets would be a hit with fans, and an item to check off his bucket list.

“I started to think about what I used to call the ‘Orville and Friends’ project — who would I want to work with?” he wonders. “Honestly, I foresaw it happening much later in my career.”

Then, Willie Nelson called. In 2022, the country legend got in touch with Peck, asking if he would be interested in recording a duet version of “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other,” the 1981 Western waltz about gay cowboys that Nelson covered in 2006.

It helped that Peck was already intimately familiar with the song; for years before Nelson called him, he was already covering it in his live sets. As a fan of hokum songs — an offshoot of country music that incorporates “comedy, stand-up, wordplay and characterization” — Peck always found “Cowboys” to be a particularly fascinating song.

“It uses that humor to talk about something really blatantly, and it kind of does a little one-two on people,” he explains. “For those of us who are in the community, it makes us smile, because we understand it intrinsically. For those that aren’t, it’s almost like an easy, interesting way to maybe understand the concept; how there is still a lot of repression, suppression, oppression, all the -pressions to do with queerness in these more typical country spaces.”

To bring that narrative full circle by performing it alongside the country legend who made it famous, Peck says, stands out as a distinct honor. “As a queer person who grew up loving country, I didn’t see a country artist like myself when I was younger — I still have that yearning within me to find acceptance within country,” he says. “Between Willie and Dolly, there’s only a few true, untouchable country legends left. So to get that personal validation from Willie … it  healed a lot of stuff for me.”

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In working with so many new collaborators throughout Stampede, Peck focused on “evolving” his artistry, from the way he performs on his new songs to the way he presents himself to fans. Evolution was always part of his plan, he explains, because some of his favorite artists always managed to push the envelope forward.

“David Bowie is a huge inspiration of mine, because there’s distinct eras of his career,” he says. “Ziggy Stardust, for instance — the persona, the costumes, the allure, the lore of it, it’s such an incredible feat. But I think if he had remained Ziggy Stardust for his whole career, I don’t know if I or anyone else would have loved it as much. You just get to enjoy this thing in this particular moment, before it changes again.”

Naturally, Peck understands why “eras” for pop stars have become increasingly popular over the last few years. “Change is good for artists — to challenge myslef and to be more vulnerable and to put myself out there a little more. But I think it’s also good for fans,” he explains. “I think people really get comfortable in a lot of things that I do. Changing it up and seeing what else they might be into is a good thing. I think we all can embrace change.”

Yet one area where Peck still hasn’t seen quite enough change is in the country music industry. While the genre is currently enjoying new levels of success thanks to dominant runs from artists like Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan and Luke Combs, Peck also recognizes that the genre isn’t currently built to support talent from marginalized groups.

“The fact is that there’s a heavily politicized grip on country music,” he says. “For some people, this is a genre that represents a type of American lifestyle, a type of belief system, of religion. They think that country music is supposed to represent those things for them. They don’t realize that country is the most diverse American genres, because it’s built off of so many different cultures. That should be reflected in the people who make it and enjoy it.”

It certainly doesn’t help, he adds, that country music remains largely insular from the music industry at large. “Country, more so than any other genre, has really been controlled by the machine that is Nashville and country radio. It sort of exists in a vacuum, where even people very high up in the music industry that work in the pop world don’t know how to approach Nashville.”

But Peck remains assured that change is coming — slowly, but surely. As the number of artists speaking out in support of a more inclusive vision of country grows — including Mickey Guyton, TJ Osborne, Allison Russell, Maren Morris, Kelsea Ballerini and others — the singer says labels will have to start listening soon.

“There’s a few of us that have been trying to chip away at the wall that is Nashville, and I think there’s enough of us now that they can’t really hold the barricades anymore. The floodgates are gonna burst open,” he says. “And that is a great thing.”