lifestyle

Billboard’s Power Pets is a feature focusing on musicians’ best friends — no, not the humans, but the furry (and some scaly and feathery!) ones who bring extra joy and companionship to artists. Celebrities will be sharing sweet details about their beloved pets and how their furbabies enrich their lives. For the sixth story in the series, we talked to country star Orville Peck.

In the summer of 2023, Orville Peck was coming out the other side of the hardest years of his life. After years of growing his profile as an emerging country artist, the singer pressed pause on his rapid ascent to go to rehab. After finishing his program and learning how to live sober, Peck looked around at his life and knew that he needed to change a few things.

“I had been very isolated in the last bit of my life leading up to that point,” he recalls. “For the first time in my life, I had finally taken some time off of touring. So I thought it was the perfect opportunity for me to have some company in my life and to have something to take care of other than just myself.”

Moving through a series of rescue organizations, Peck began looking for a dog to adopt. While searching for “the right match,” as he called it, the singer found himself struggling to find an animal that was the perfect fit for himself and his home. Then a friend of a friend called him — she had just rescued a 1-year-old dog from a local kill shelter and thought they might be a good fit. “I went to meet her in a park, and immediately I just knew that this was my dog,” he says. “I think I adopted her later that day.”

A little more than two years later, Peck is practically inseparable from Queenie, his “three years young” mixed-breed companion. While her name may denote a certain regal countenance, Peck says that Queenie actually “isn’t very high maintenance.” Instead, her name was born out of a nature fact that Peck learned growing up in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“When I first got her, especially when she was a little younger, she looked a little bit like a hyena. She had this interesting pattern in her coat that’s faded a lot since she’s gotten a bit older,” he says. “I’m South African, I love animals, and I knew hyenas have a queendom. They’re one of the few animal species that have a matriarch, and the head of a hyena pack is called a queen. So I decided to call her Queenie.”

The pair live together with Peck’s partner in Los Angeles, though Peck is quick to point out that Queenie tends to accompany him in his sojourns out of the Golden State.

“It’s very handy because my partner flies planes, so often he will fly her up to meet me on tour and she comes on the bus for a few weeks. So Queenie’s been everywhere with me,” he says. “I want her around my life as much as humanly possible, so anytime that it feels kind of realistic and comfortable where she won’t be too mixed up by it, I try to bring her out with me.”

Earlier this year, Peck found himself living in New York City for his Broadway debut in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. After he’d settled into his routine (and the grueling Broadway schedule), Peck brought Queenie out to the city to live with him for the final months of his performance — and learned the hard way that she is not necessarily a big city dog.

“Yeah, she is a Los Angeles dog through and through. She has only ever really learned to do her business in a backyard, so she’s kind of pee shy — she likes having her little spot, and she doesn’t want to have people around,” he says, noting how difficult that made her bathroom breaks in New York. “We found one park in the city where she finally felt comfortable doing her business, and so I would just have to take her there every time she needed to go to the bathroom, which is totally ridiculous. But also, why are we judging? I don’t want people watching me do that either!”

It’s one of very few tendencies Queenie has that can be occasionally taxing for the country singer. Though he emphasizes that he is “one of those crazy pet people where there’s just nothing that she could do that could ever make me angry,” Peck says there is one habit of Queenie’s in particular that does create something of a hazard for him.

“When I come home, even if it’s just from the store, she acts like I’ve gone away to war for 20 years and we’re being reunited — which is genuinely so sweet and so comforting. The problem is, I also have quite a steep staircase going up from my front door to my house,” he says, laughing. “Multiple times when I’ve gotten to the top of the staircase, she will jump up to pound her paws on my chest as a show of love. I have almost literally tumbled, probably to severe injury, if not death.”

Yet Peck points out that he’s seen Queenie transform since he first adopted her. A key example he uses involves his own music — when the singer first adopted Queenie, she was not a fan of his guitar, taking multiple opportunities to make that known. “Even when I would just pick up the guitar, she would run out of the room,” he says. “There were a few times where in the middle of the night, she went and pissed by the guitar, which I like to think was the harshest review I’ve ever gotten.”

But as time went on, Queenie not only began to tolerate his guitar playing, she looked forward to it. “She really loves when I sing, so she’s not nearly as afraid anymore. When I sing, she actually tilts her head to the side, and she’ll come over and sit next to me. I think she genuinely likes it now.”

That change applies beyond just Queenie’s musical taste. Shortly after adoption, Peck notes how his dog — like many other rescue animals — exhibited lots of fear and anxiety, even when he could tell “that there was a curiosity, and that she wanted to be friendly.”

As their relationship developed over time, Peck says he watched Queenie blossom into an affectionate, fun-loving animal who wasn’t scared to show her love. “You could just see a very happy dog emerging that was not afraid at all. Now, I joke that she would go home with a burglar,” he says. “She is really just the most playful, curious, happy dog. I’m so grateful for that, because I never have to worry about her with other people.”

Yet the biggest change Peck has noticed is not in his pet, but in himself. In the two-plus years that he has had Queenie, the singer says that he has grown into a more loving, caring person from being in constant companionship with a dog who shows that came level of love and care for him.

“At the risk of sounding like a total cliché, she rescued me in a lot of ways. My boyfriend laughs at me because I say it all the time, but I’m actually constantly in disbelief that I get to have this creature living with me and hanging out with me,” he says. “She still saves me constantly. It’s truly the most comforting thing in my life to know that when I get home, she’s going to try and push me down the stairs and kill me because of how much she loves me.”