Daniel Pitout, known professionally as Orville Peck, is a South African country musician and actor based in the United States and Canada, widely known for often wearing a mask and not showing his face publicly.
real name: Daniel Pitout
labels: Sub Pop
genres: country rock, alternative rock
influenced by: Patrick Haggerty
awards: Libera Award for Best Breakthrough Artist
plays: guitar
Facts from Wikidata and Discogs, free to use.
Peck was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and lived there until he was 15. He grew up in a mixed-race family, and is "part-white, part-Indian". As a child, he taught himself music by playing an acoustic guitar and an old Casio keyboard. His father is a sound engineer and Orville did voice-over work for cartoons and other media as a child. Growing up, he took ballet classes for 12 years and performed in musical theater productions. Peck immigrated to Canada in 2003. By his early 20s, he had been on national tours of musicals.
Orville Peck developed his signature mask in 2018. Peck self-produced his debut album Pony at The Noise Floor recording studio on Gabriola Island, and released it in 2019 through a collaboration with Sub Pop. He has noted that he "wrote, produced and played every instrument he could" on the album while working in a coffee shop and living with his parents. In June of that year, he performed his songs "Dead of Night" and "Take You Back" live on CBC Radio One's Q. Pony was named to the initial longlist for the 2019 Polaris Music Prize in June 2019. The album received a Juno Award nomination for Alternative Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2020.
In an interview with National Public Radio on June 18, 2019, Orville said: "I've never raised cattle or anything like that, but I think I've been a cowboy my whole life."