Country singer Orville Peck still wears a mask, but he’s tired of hiding

The rise of Orville Peck has coincided with this cultural shift. The 36-year-old singer-songwriter – who performs under a pseudonym and wears a mask – makes country music that recalls outlaw traditions and has found fans in his collaborators Willie Nelson, Elton John and Kylie Minogue. The gay artist also serves as a reminder that neither America nor Americana is as homogenous and heteronormative as it may seem.

“Country culture, country music, cowboy culture, all of these things have different origins,” Peck says via Zoom. “The truth is, country music has always been diverse and has always been made by many people.”

As a child, Peck, who was born in South Africa and moved to Canada as a teenager, loved the music and larger-than-life characters of Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash, but by the time he reached adulthood, country music had become a “politicized” genre after 9/11: The Dixie Chicks were pushed out of the industry and Toby Keith was setting the tone for Nashville with “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” This reactionary status quo inspired Peck to look to country music’s past for inspiration.

“If you were into country music in the early 2000s and you were alternative or had a different attitude … then the obvious way to go was to go with the outlaws and the classic stuff, because that wasn’t what it was about,” Peck says. “It was about actually being an individual and – just like the word says – being outside the law. … Those were the things that interested me because I felt outside of things.”

Peck played in punk bands and pursued a career in musical theater before embracing his cowboy alter ego, donning the hat, boots, and his iconic mask. Even for a non-American, the iconography of the cowboy had always resonated with a self-proclaimed outsider drawn to figures like the Lone Ranger or even Indiana Jones.

“(The cowboy) represents so much individuality and finding strength in things like alienation, loneliness, aloneness and misunderstanding,” he says. “The mythical cowboy really speaks to people who are different but don’t want that to be their weakness.”

Crafting the Orville Peck persona has allowed him to magnify a private part of his identity, just as a professional wrestler transforms his real-life persona into a brash brawler in the ring. Similarly, the size of Peck’s mask, which once included a domino over his eyes and face-obscuring bangs, has an inverse relationship to the artist’s personal and artistic self-confidence. He hopes his fans will applaud his evolution wherever it takes him.

“It’s really important for artists to evolve,” he says. “I make art and music for myself and have always listened to my gut when it comes to what kind of artist I want to be and what I want to release.”

June 30th at 7pm at Anthem, 901 Wharf St. SW. www.theanthemdc.com. $59.50.