Orville Peck has called many places home.

Country music’s most mysterious outlaw—who never reveals his face, instead concealing his identity behind a mask even as he sings about deeply personal things—was born in Johannesburg, but grew up in Vancouver. He studied in London, and then criss-crossed continents playing punk shows and performing in touring musicals.

For six years, he didn’t have a permanent residence at all. In true troubadour fashion, he stayed with family and friends on breaks between playing shows all over the world—until he finally bought a place of his own in Los Angeles. Previously owned by John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the midcentury treehouse came with reclaimed wood furniture and a view of the Hollywood Hills.

“I’ve lived in so many different places, and they were at such different times in my life,” Peck says over the phone. “Some cities hold really beautiful, happy, formative memories to me; some cities hold hard, struggling, growing-pain memories for me. I sing about every one of them in my music, and I love them all dearly.”

He’s chatting just before he heads off on his mammoth 40-date Stampede tour, in support of his EP—and upcoming album—of the same name. He sounds relaxed and measured, more softly-spoken than you might expect after hearing the resonant baritone of his recordings.

“The best part of being a touring musician is getting to go back to these places and revisit these different parts of your life,” Peck continues. “Vancouver is absolutely one of my homes; I have more memories there than anywhere else.”

Stampede is Peck’s first major tour in almost a year. In 2023, he halted his Bronco headlining jaunt partway through; a planned two-night stand at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre never happened. After 17 years of constant motion, something had to give. Looking back now, that something was Peck himself.

“I had a really dark year last year,” he admits, adding that it was the first time he had ever cancelled a tour. “I had a really hard time struggling with my mental health and my physical health, too.”

Aside from a few covers for various one-off projects, Peck released his first new song since 2022’s wildly successful Bronco in April of this year: a cover of Ned Sublette’s “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other”, recorded alongside Willie Nelson. The queer country song fit right into Peck’s streak as a trailblazing gay artist in a conservative genre, and also hinted at what his next undertaking would look like: an album full of duets.

The first half of the project, Stampede: Vol. 1, dropped in May, and includes everyone from roots chanteuse Allison Russell and pop starlet Noah Cyrus to the Rocket Man himself, Elton John.

Recording Stampede “was one of the most fun, adventurous, exciting experiences that I’ve ever had making music,” Peck says earnestly. “I made a really conscious decision that it wasn’t going to be just an Orville Peck album with features on it. I wanted every single song to be a completely true collaboration between me and the other person. It’s like my music and their music meeting in the middle.”

The second half drops on August 2 and has that same collaborative energy. “Death Valley High” fuses Peck’s growl with Beck’s experimental rat-a-tat delivery; bluegrass band Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway guest on an Americana-drenched cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “Papa Was a Rodeo”; and Teddy Swims lends his smokey voice to mid-tempo “Ever You’re Gone”.

It’s a heterogeneous mix of styles, influences, and tones. Lead single “Midnight Ride” makes that clear: the bells-and-whistles maximalist dance party was produced by Diplo and is a double-act with the one and only Kylie Minogue.

“Growing up in South Africa, Kylie Minogue was the ultimate,” Peck enthuses. He pitched the concept of “a country western disco dance song,” and she was immediately sold. “It might be my favourite song on the album, because I’m such a Kylie fan,” he adds. “It was just so fun to create with her.”

It’s a long way away from his debut record—2019’s Pony—that Peck created largely by himself. That self-produced album saw him play guitar, banjo, and keyboards alongside delivering the husky vocals. It’s melodramatic and moody, at times almost spartan. On the cover, only his eyes are visible under a mask that hangs past his chin.

Bronco moved to a more lush production and grander scale, but much of the heart remained the same: broody and lyrical, spinning tales about a wild west that exists only in pastiched nostalgia. Peck is a storyteller, weaving an expansive mythos of wild horses and highwaymen and chance encounters in ghost town saloons.

While Peck’s first two full-lengths definitely have a sense of camp about them, they aren’t exactly joyful (just try listening to “Let Me Drown” without crying). Stampede is something else entirely: it’s fun. Maybe it’s not so far-fetched to imagine that, in one of those towns Peck’s roving persona sauntered into, he found a disco.

IF YOU KNOW where to look, you can spot Peck all over Vancouver’s punk music archive. His best-known noise group released a couple of albums, and he soon became a veteran of the scene: well-known enough that BeatRoute affectionately termed one of his Vancouver projects a “ ‘weird punk’ supergroup”—even though it only released one EP of scuzzy garage rock tracks.

Those tracks sound like the Pixies, and his best-known band produced unhinged noise-punk: not exactly an obvious leap to cowboy-riffing Americana. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find there are actually a lot of common sensibilities between the genres.

“There are a lot of similarities in punk and country—at least the kind of country I like. My favourite kind of country would be a lot of the outlaw musicians,” Peck explains, referring to iconoclastic, rebellious artists like Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard—and yes, Willie Nelson. “The themes, lyrically, and also the music in that era of country—it was very much about rebellion and questioning the norm: finding clever, witty, playful ways to portray those ideas through music, using humour and satire.”

When Pony was released under his chosen moniker in 2019—on Sub Pop, a label once better known for grunge and indie than country and folk—astute listeners noted the hardcore undertones.

“Pay attention,” Mike Usinger (who else?) wrote in this very paper ahead of Peck’s sold-out show at the Commodore that summer, “and you’ll notice the Velvet Underground–strength distortion in ‘Kansas (Remembers Me Now)’ and the garage-goth organs in ‘Old River’.”

The Commodore was an order of magnitude bigger than Peck’s old Vancouver stomping grounds. When he rose the ranks in the local punk scene, he was playing sweaty shows in grassroots rooms that have since been lost to the waves of rising rent, redevelopment, and burnout.

“I was playing mostly dive bars,” he reminisces. “Places like the Cobalt and Pat’s Pub and Pub 340; a lot of DIY venues back in the day like the Emergency Room; places that are long gone now.”

His mark hasn’t just been left on our music venues, either. Mount Pleasant foodies will be thrilled to learn that he used to work at mainstay vegetarian joint Budgie’s Burritos.

His go-to order? “A Jamedog bowl—the potatoes are in a bowl, not in a burrito, because you’d get really sick of eating a burrito if you worked there every day,” Peck says without missing a beat. “You’ve got to go with all three sauces, and put on a ton of the green hot sauce. And the secret ingredient that people always skip is the chili oil paste.”

He still visits Budgie’s whenever he’s in town. “There’s actually a secret photograph of me there,” he adds playfully, without revealing its exact location.

Arguably, every photo of Peck out of costume is a secret. His persona is, by design, a man of mystery. Even aside from his trademark mask, his brand is heavy on clothing staples: Stetsons and cowboy boots and fringe. Put him in a t-shirt and jeans and he could be almost anybody.

“Orville Peck has it all figured out,” quipped drag queen Trixie Mattel in a Paper Magazine Q&A with singer Chappell Roan (truly the queer pop culture crossover event of the year). “I’ve been out at gay bars with Orville Peck where they make him take pictures of me. I’m like, ‘Wow, you just asked Orville Peck to take a picture of us, but you don’t know that.’ ”

His mask has become his calling card—but there are hints that Peck is almost done with being a closed book.

Instead of the solitary equine theming of Pony and Bronco, Stampede’s namesake captures multiplicity. And while the cover art of both previous releases see Peck alone—or alone with a giant horse—in nebulous nowhere-land, Stampede: Vol. 1 situates him in a busy downtown scene. Queer couples look sexy and shirtless. A real city, and real hills, sprawl into the background. Peck still stands apart, but the dangling fringe is stripped off the bottom of the mask. Instead it just covers his eyes, bandit-style.

“I’ve been slowly revealing more of my face with each album,” Peck says. “It’s my attempt to evolve. I like change; I think change as an artist is really important and actually very crucial to keep making good art. And I like challenging myself to be more vulnerable.”

Perhaps working with other people was just what he needed to re-centre himself. After all, he cut his teeth by playing in bands. (Those collaborative, DIY sensibilities run deep, especially when it comes to his live shows. “I’m still the kind of person that’s first up in the morning, on stage, helping out and setting things up,” Peck says. “I’m usually there before everyone else that works with me, and they all get very annoyed.”)

It makes sense, then, that an album dedicated to the wonder of human connection is what brought him back to the music.

“This project, getting to work with all these different people and collaborate on songs that took me so far out of my comfort zone, it made me excited about music again,” Peck reflects. “It made me have fun with music without any sort of worry about what people were going to think about it.”

Peck may be one of a kind. But he isn’t alone.