THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 cutoffs, curled the ends of their long hair,
and smiled. Likewise, the genre has not
always been a welcoming place for peo-
ple of color. In 2021, the twenty-eight-
year-old singer Morgan Wallen, who
was filmed using a racial slur while drunk,
saw sales of his record “Dangerous: The
Double Album” increase by more than
five hundred per cent in the twenty-four
hours following the incident. (“Danger-
ous” eventually became the best-selling
album of that year, in any genre.)
Still, change is afoot. It is increas-
ingly possible to circumvent the dusty
Nashville institutions that have long fa-
cilitated a venomous culture of gate-
keeping, and women of color, such as
Mickey Guyton, Rhiannon Giddens,
and Yola, are finally finding more wide-
spread recognition. Care is also being
taken within the genre to avoid roman-
ticizing the more gruesome elements of
Southern identity. (Both the Dixie
Chicks and Lady Antebellum revised
their names in 2020, becoming the Chicks
and Lady A.) Peck is gay, but he is not
the first openly gay musician in coun-
try music. He has significant predeces-
sors—including members of the band
Lavender Country, whose self-titled
début LP, from 1973, is widely described
as the first gay-themed country record;
the soulful singer and songwriter Brandi
Carlile; and the genre-thwarting per-
former Lil Nas X—and he is quick to
point out that he is not a lone pioneer.
“There has always been people of color
making country music, and there has al-
ways been queer cowboys and cowgirls,”
he told the Times, in 2019.
But Peck is nonetheless part of a van-
guard redefining the notion of the coun-
try outlaw. For decades, country has been
guided by strict ideas of authenticity:
the music should be unpretentious, work-
ing class, real. Yet, when musical stric-
tures become too limiting, new work can
feel timid and predictable. As hip-hop
and pop have edged toward the surreal,
prizing fearlessness and deviation—the
most exciting young artists in those
genres tend to be provocateurs, of a sort—
country has remained earthbound. Peck
is one of the first country artists in a
long time who seems willing and able
to get a little weird, beginning with the
masks and carrying through to his haunt-
ing songs. Country has a long history
of theatricality, and certainly there is no
other genre as preoccupied with proper
costuming: cowboy hats, Nudie suits,
frosted tips, boot-cut jeans. The title
track of “Bronco,” a pedal-steel-laden
ode to being wild and free—for better
and for worse—nods to the showman-
ship and decadence of “Aloha from Ha-
waii”-era Presley, a blur of sideburns and
rhinestones, with gold rings cluttering
his fingers. Even Peck’s galloping ca-
dence recalls the King’s, in lines such as:Bronco running wild
Yeah, baby, I’m on fire
I’m just my daddy’s child
Running something down the wire.Yet Peck also shares some of Pres-
ley’s suffering. (After the filming of
“Aloha from Hawaii,” in 1973, Presley’s
divorce was finalized, and he overdosed
on Demerol and was briefly semi-co-
matose. In 1977, he was found dead in
an upstairs bathroom at Graceland.)
On “Let Me Drown,” a mournful piano
ballad, Peck sounds defeated. His voice
is clear and potent; the production is
hollow, quivering:No, I can’t be kind, since I lost my mind
And this town just ain’t big enough for the
both of us now
Let me drown.Peck is not alone in finding mean-
ing and solace in a fantasy of the Amer-
ican West: the soft eroticism of cowboy
culture, the commitment to constant
motion, the pleasure (and vague mel-
ancholy) of trotting off into a hazy sun-
set, that lonesome expanse, the way it
makes misery feel almost romantic.
“Bronco”—much like the cowboy cul-
ture the record emulates and exalts—is
equal parts exhilarated and broken. The
album starts with an admission that
feels as tantalizing as it does despon-
dent. “Buddy, we got major blues,” Peck
sings on “Daytona Sand.” He has said
that “Bronco” was born from a fallow
period in early 2020, when touring mu-
sicians were suddenly grounded by the
pandemic, and the frantic pace of life
on the road gave way to a kind of un-
settling stillness. Peck found the expe-
rience bleak. “I was in the lowest place
in my life that I’ve ever been,” he told
a reporter. From that darkness, “Bronco”
appeared. It is Peck’s most fully realized
work so far—both his most bereaved
and his most beautiful.