Orville Peck’s voice bellows like a country crooner’s from the 1950s, but the songs he’s penning and singing are contemporary in the cheekiest way possible. Take “Drive Me, Crazy,” from his new EP Show Pony. In it, he tells the story of two truckers in love with one another from the distance of their separate eighteen wheel-rigs, flirting by weaving in and out of lanes and catching up-close glimpses of each other in the side-view mirrors. “I wanted to write a piano ballad, almost a country-meets-Elton-John power ballad, and get to play piano on it,” Peck says. “Two truckers passing each other constantly, their love story existing on the highways. I loved writing that.”
Show Pony is Peck’s second major project after 2019’s full-length Pony. On it, the balladeer deepens the intimacy and ambition of his songwriting. On the wistful “Dead of Night,” he sings of doomed unrequited love through a lens of nostalgia, inspired by a real relationship from his own past. “It took a certain amount of growing up for me to be able to make the kind of country music I wanted to make, which is essentially just sincere stories about me and the people I know and the things I’ve done,” he says. “It took me a long time to get to a place as a writer to feel okay with being exposed I suppose.”
Teaming up with Honda Stage and Billboard for a special set, Peck sang these two tracks with the melancholic bravado that each record demands and an unmistakeable confidence in the vulnerability of their lyrics. Though often misinterpreted, his ubiquitous fringed masks are a function of his openness rather than a tool used to conceal who he really is. As Peck puts it, “To me, this is just an expression of who I am deep in my heart and who I want to be as an artist,” he says. “It allows me the freedom to play. It allows me the freedom to be creative. It allows me the freedom to get away with also being completely sincere. I just think it’s kind of what I needed to do in order to make the art that I wanted to make.”
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