Orville Peck wants to make one thing clear: he doesn't miss the tassels on his mask.

"The fringe was sort of a pain in the ass for a lot of things, like going to dinners and things like that. So now that's a lot easier," the country crooner tells GRAMMY.com with a laugh. "When I first started doing shows with my new mask, it was a little nerve-wracking to go out and feel like I was sort of a little naked, but I've gotten over that now."

Tassels or not, Peck's signature face covering has been a major part of his mystique since he burst onto the country scene with his 2019 debut album, Pony. Part Lone Ranger symbol, part leather daddy roleplay, the mask has both protected the singer's true identity (sure, that information is out there, but we're not about to spoil it here) and added a theatrical allure to the brand of offbeat outlaw country that's made him famous.

But on the verge of releasing Stampede, his new duets album (which dropped Aug. 2 via Warner Records), Peck felt confident it was time to update his look — fringe be damned. "I know people feel very connected to the mask and very protective over it, but I make art for myself," he says just days after playing the Newport Folk Festival as part of his ongoing Stampede Tour, which wraps with two shows in Brooklyn, New York on Oct. 19 and 20.

"So when I know it's time to evolve and change something, that's because I need a challenge," the singer continues. "Something different to keep me inspired as an artist and making good art, rather than just doing the same thing over and over again, or pandering to people who expect me to be something or someone."

From the moment he first donned the fringed mask and introduced the world to his stage name, Peck has been hell-bent on blazing his own path through the country scene. After all, he's never checked all — or any — of the boxes the Nashville elite might expect. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa and raised in Vancouver, Canada, the deep-voiced troubadour also happens to be one of the few proudly and openly gay men in the country space — all markers that buck traditional conventions of what makes a 21st century country star.

"I say I'm from all over the place, which is essentially the truth," the singer explained in the 2020 mini-documentary exploring his origins titled "The Orville Peck Story." "You know, I've kind of been on the road my whole life. I was a huge fan of Westerns, I was a huge fan of the Lone Ranger. Looking back on it, being this out-of-place, lonely kid, I can really understand why the image of a cowboy connected to me so hard."

The archetype also runs in his bloodline: in South Africa: his grandfather was a gun-toting sheriff on horseback, and a young Orville spent years roaming the bush with his dad, but the singer is quick to clarify with a knowing chuckle that he sees himself as "more the Marty Robbins [type] rather than the guy who's actually working the ranch."

Peck also admits he's felt, at times, excluded from what he calls the "Nashville machine" of major-label country ("I think they have a very decided mandate of what they want to be country music, and what they think is profitable — and sadly, that doesn't leave tons of room for diversity"). But his success as an outlier who's both queer and non-American is also a testament to the fact that the genre doesn't belong exclusively to some select group of elites dictating who's allowed to pick up a guitar. 

"As far as what makes a country musician, I think it's anybody who has a love for country and wants to have their perspective in it," he adds. "With all due, the most important and meaningful mechanism of country is, in fact, just storytelling."

If anything, Peck's first album harkened back to a time — and sound — that predates the glossy sheen and honky-tonk bro culture of modern country altogether. Early songs like "Hope to Die" and "Turn to Hate" tapped into the frank, hardscrabble narratives favored by greats like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn and Merle Haggard, as Peck painted vivid imagery on the self-produced Pony of a Wild West filled with heartbreak and hatred, ghost towns and standoffs with lost souls. ("Stark, hollow town, Carson City lights/ Baby, let's get high/ Spend a Johnny's cash, hitch another ride," he intones on "Dead of Night," the LP's haunting opener.)

Quick to strike while the proverbial cattle brand was hot, Peck soon inked a deal with Columbia Records and doubled down on the vintage aesthetic and high noon-ready sonic palette of Pony with the 2020 EP, Show Pony.

A more flamboyant evolution of its predecessor, the six-track project continued Peck's reverence for country icons of the past by featuring a menacing reinvention of Bobbie Gentry's '60s-era crossover hit "Fancy" on top of brooding originals like "Summertime" and "No Glory in the West." The biggest spectacle on Show Pony, however, came in the form of "Legends Never Die," an audacious, anthemic duet with none other than Shania Twain.

Not only did the song give the five-time GRAMMY winner an excuse to revisit her well-documented love for a leopard-print jumpsuit — it added a dash of glitz and glamor to Peck's mysterious persona, as he harmonized with the Queen of Country Pop on lines like, "I've been rode hard and put up wet/ Ain't nothing in this world that I can't get/ Don't worry 'bout making sure they won't forget/ No it's fine/ 'Cause legends never die."

At the time, working with his idol served as a major breakout moment for the musical desperado. But as the first duet of Peck's career — which now includes an album dedicated to the art of collaboration — the song was a marked departure from his tried and true approach as a musical Lone Ranger.

"I was willing to do it because it was Shania and I was so obsessed with her. You know, I wrote the song for her and I," he says. "But I used to be very opposed to even writing with other people. It was hard for me because I grew up so DIY in this industry, and so protective over my vision and my music that it was a skill I had to develop."

Throughout the next couple of years, Peck also had to learn how to manage the realities of his growing fame. The country crooner's career reached new heights with the release of his sophomore album, Bronco, which he rolled out in three chapters over the winter and spring of 2022. 

Steeped in the singer's now-signature pastiche of hypermasculine cowboy fantasies, the studio effort successfully balanced the camp of sly, homoerotic cuts like "Daytona Sand" and "The Curse of the Blackened Eye" with the yearning sincerity of ballads like "C'mon Baby, Cry" and "Hexie Mountains." Peck also searched out new sonic influences on the album, finding inspiration in everything from '60s and '70s psychedelia to South African folk music like marabi and mbaqanga — essentially paving the way for the genre-hopping sound of Stampede.

"With Pony, [that] was my first, lonely, frightened little album, and then Show Pony was my glitzy attempt at confidence, and now Bronco is all about breaking free and being untamed and unrestrained," Peck said in an interview with Billboard Pride at the time.

The muscled musical freedom he harnessed on his sophomore set paid off: in addition to becoming the singer's first official entry on the Billboard 200, it was a genre-hopping success on the folk, country and rock charts — where it reached Nos. 4, 11 and 13, respectively.

Bronco also arrived in the wake of a cavalcade of ever-increasingly high-profile opportunities for Peck: Lady Gaga tapped him to reimagine "Born This Way" for BORN THIS WAY THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY; Harry Styles asked the singer to open for his fan-favorite "Harryween" shows at Madison Square Garden; and he starred in the campaign for Beyoncé's Ivy Park Rodeo fashion line. 

And that's not all: country music's self-described anti-hero suddenly found himself labeled a gay icon-in-the-making as he appeared as a coach and celebrity mentor on the Apple TV+ series My Kind of Country, received the Cultural Icon Award by The Tom of Finland Foundation for "artistic achievement and immeasurable contributions to the art and culture of [the LGBTQIA+] community," and appeared as a guest judge on the main stage of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Eager to get back on the road following the pandemic, Peck announced a sprawling tour in support of Bronco, which would take him all around the country through the summer of 2023. But following a sold-out show at The Theater at Madison Square Garden that June for Pride, the singer reached a breaking point.

"I was starting to work on a new album and was feeling a lot of pressure from the jump in success that I'd had around that time; it was all just coming to a head and I was completely burning myself out," he says. "So I had to basically make the decision to stop everything and go take care of myself, because my depression and my mental health was so bad. It was really just too much for me."

So, more than a year after Bronco's release, Peck stopped the avalanche of momentum and canceled the rest of The Bronco Tour to focus on his mental health. "It definitely wasn't easy," he says with hindsight. "I felt like I was letting myself down, everyone who works with me down…all my fans. So it was a very heavy and hard decision. But I'm so happy I did it because it saved my life."

Peck largely spent the rest of the year away from the spotlight, candidly acknowledging in a December Instagram post that "2023 unexpectedly turned out to be the hardest year of my life." But having taken the necessary time to heal, he was ready to dive into his next musical chapter, and within a matter of weeks, he was cryptically teasing Stampede.

Coming off of such a major reset, Peck explains that he views Stampede as a standalone "concept album" of sorts, rather than the latest entry in his canon of solo records. Instead of going it alone, he packed the album with a parade of close friends and music industry legends, both fellow rabble-rousers in the country scene and surprising GRAMMY winners from the worlds of dance-pop, American roots music, EDM and alt-rock.

The album's first single was a duet with Willie Nelson on "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other" — a groundbreaking and subversive yarn written in 1981 by Latin country artist Ned Sublette that Nelson first recorded in 2006.

"I couldn't believe that Willie Nelson was singing a song about gay cowboys," Peck says of the first time he heard the country icon's solo version, which found the 12-time GRAMMY winner singing, "Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other/ Say, what do you think all them saddles and boots was about?" with a wink over waltzing guitar. 

It was Nelson's idea to update the song as a duet, which eventually led Peck to the idea of Stampede. In fact, he asked the younger singer to collaborate on the track the first time they ever met aboard the 91-year-old legend's famous tour bus. "It was overwhelming and validating," Peck remembers. "I mean, if we want to talk about feeling excluded from country, nothing makes you feel more included than Willie Nelson asking you to do a duet."

High off making magic with Nelson, Peck extended that same spirit of camaraderie to some of his closest friends and peers from all corners of the country landscape — from his My Kind of Country costar Mickey Guyton to neotraditional country trio Midland, as well as Canadian folk chanteuse Allison Russell and crosspicking bluegrass virtuoso Molly Tuttle, whom Peck touts as "one of the best guitarists alive."

The singer was equally intentional when it came to melding his sound with other genres, whether he was grooving to the chugging, celebratory "Death Valley High" with Beck, whipping up a whistling, disco-country bop in "Midnight Ride" with Kylie Minogue and Diplo or going toe to toe in a vocal showcase with Teddy Swims on the soaring, gospel-tinged "Ever You're Gone." Along with showing his versatility, Stampede also displays a rejuvenated Peck who is eager to continue pushing the boundaries of country music and beyond.

"I didn't intend for it to be in the usual vein of my solo stuff," Peck says of his approach to the album. "The intention was that I wanted to collaborate with each of these people. So take 50 percent of me and 50 percent of whoever the other artist is, and see what we could make together, you know?"

While Stampede kicks off on an unabashedly gay note with that Willie Nelson duet, it's bookended by a joyful cover of Glen Campbell's beloved 1975 classic "Rhinestone Cowboy." Peck assembled pals Waylon Payne, TJ Osborne of Brothers Osborne and Fancy Hagood for a "star-spangled rodeo" of a finale that felt poignantly momentous for all four trailblazers. 

"Obviously, there are not that many out gay men in country music, so we all kind of have this bond together," Peck points out, noting that the quartet have cleverly christened themselves "The High-Gay Men" in their ongoing group chat. "So I knew that it was important to do something really historic in a sense, and meaningful that four, out, proud, gay men in country could get together and do a song together."

Now that the album is out, Peck is prepared to keep the Stampede raging. His sixth annual Orville Peck's Rodeo — a roving mini-festival the singer first dreamt up in the days of Pony — will take place later this summer as part of his touring plans in support of the LP. Hosted by the legendary John Waters and co-headlined by Tanya Tucker, the event promises to deliver three days of live music, drag performances, after-parties and surprises galore. And for the first time, it's taking over Nashville. 

Triumphantly descending on Music City U.S.A. with a band of misfits and icons in tow might feel like nothing short of vindication for a masked vigilante who's spent his entire career playing by his own rules. But for Peck, it's always been about his dedication to the art rather than seeking approval from the industry that surrounds it. 

"I'll say it like this: I don't feel like an outsider in country music," he concludes. "Because I love country music more than anybody."