Not-So-Lone Rangers: Out In The Country All Year Long

When Orville Peck's first couple of songs popped up on streaming platforms in 2017 and 2018, he was a virtual unknown, and not just because he constantly obscured his face behind a fringed, leather mask. Eventually, the seemingly contradictory elements of his image became a calling card, so that it didn't seem unfathomable that he'd be able to land Shania Twain as a singing partner for his upcoming, major label EP. Part of what put Peck on the map was last year's Pony, his debut album for renowned indie Sub Pop, on which he crooned with alluringly broody bravado about restless detachment, lust, nostalgia and arid western landscapes framed by eerie, reverb-hazed echoes of David Lynch soundtracks and New Wave and shoegaze aesthetics. But the dashing, outlandish mystique of his persona was at least an equal source of fascination. Here was a gay, costumed, Lone Ranger type, replacing cowboy machismo with fashionable western camp, melancholy eroticism and bondage imagery, while disclosing very little autobiographical information beyond his background in the Pacific Northwest punk scene. The authors of profile after profile zeroed in on the provocative symbolism Peck seemed to offer — the notion that he was a Lone Ranger, in more than appearance, as the solitary figure staking a queer claim to country territory.