Orville Peck with Abbie Callahan

The first voices you’ll hear on Orville Peck’s fourth studio album are Emmylou Harris, Noah Cyrus and Allison Russell, harmonizing bluegrass on “Prologue (Eulogy Of A Man Turned Mule)” as they introduce Mule, a sweeping, chronological epic that narrativizes the year 2023—or, as Orville knows it, the year he “hit rock bottom before finally getting sober.” The image is stark and cinematic: three iconic musicians from different generations and genres within country music, “standing over a metaphorical coffin with me inside of it, singing about how much of a waste of my life was, as if I had died in the Bowery Hotel the night I overdosed in 2023.” Flash back to three years ago: it’s January, and Orville’s just returned home from a trip with his partner that culminated in their breakup (and a promise to return to each other later that fall for a check-in, opening the for what each hoped would be a substantial period of growth and time apart). Single and alone in Los Angeles, as we find him on “Big ‘Ol House,” Orville gives in to his destructive impulses: drinking, partying, drugging. “I’d be sitting alone inside my house feeling like a prisoner, trapped inside something I’d earned and something I never thought I would have growing up,” he says. “Yet I was feeling like I could never escape what had become this prison for myself to act out and be depressed in.” Where Pony, Bronco, and Stampede wove together bits and pieces of Orville’s life and learnings, Mule takes a linear (though not always straight) path through the hardest year of the artist’s life. Its title (also the album’s closing track) gets its name from a simple place of inspiration and comparison: “To me, the image of a mule is somehow misunderstood,” Orville says. “A mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey bred specifically for work. Mules cannot reproduce. They are trapped between two worlds, maybe always trying to figure out which one they belong to.