Amoeba Music

Orville Peck celebrates his new album, Mule (Warner Records), with an in-store signing at Amoeba Hollywood Monday, September 21st at 5pm!

To attend this event, pre-purchase Mule on vinyl in-store at Amoeba Hollywood. Tickets are available now!

Event info/to attend:

** Pre-purchase Mule on vinyl IN PERSON at Amoeba Hollywood. 
** Space is limited.
** Max 1 ticket (and 1 LP) per person.  
** Fans will receive their vinyl in the event line on 9/21 presenting the hard ticket + attached Amoeba store receipt.
** No outside or additional items please.
** No posed pics at signing table will be possible.
** In-store pre-purchases only. No online or phone orders for this special event.

Playing The Hollywood Bowl, Friday, September 18th. Full tour dates here.

Mule, Orville Peck's fourth studio album, arrives as his most intimate and ambitious work to date. Following last year's Appaloosa EP, the record unfolds as a chronological account of the year that reshaped his life, tracing the collapse of addiction, the difficult pursuit of sobriety, and the slow, often uncertain process of rebuilding. Told with unflinching honesty, humor, and compassion, Mule finds Peck confronting love, loss, and identity through songs that move fluidly between classic country storytelling, bluegrass, and expansive Americana.

 
Mule is conceived like a musical or a film, with each song marking another chapter in a deeply personal journey. The voices of Emmylou Harris, Noah Cyrus, and Allison Russell open the album with a haunting prologue that gives way to moments of chaos, heartbreak, resilience, and ultimately renewal. Along the way, Peck turns his gaze inward, reckoning not only with addiction but with the divide between the larger-than-life persona of Orville Peck and the man behind the mask. Taken together, Mule is a deeply personal portrait of resilience, redemption, and self-discovery.

Orville Peck’s Mule is a sweeping, chronological epic that narrativizes the year 2023—or, as Orville knows it, the year he “hit rock bottom before finally getting sober.”  It’s January of that year, and Orville’s just returned home from a trip with his partner that culminated in their breakup. Single and alone in Los Angeles, as we find him on “Big ‘Ol House,” Orville gives in to his destructive impulses: drinking, partying, drugging. The light at the end of the tunnel seems far in the distance.

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. They are known allegorically for being hard-working, stubborn, a burden, resilient. I think that it is hard to be a mule… but I’m also glad that I am one.”

Throughout Mule, listeners will hear high highs and low lows. “They’re always knocking at the door / You get a bed but you use the floor / They watch you take the pills / No thrills / No TV after 9,” he sings on “Rehab Blues.” But “I didn’t leave sober,” he says. “I left thinking that now at least I had control of my drinking and that I wasn’t an alcoholic, that I was smarter than that, that I was better than other people that had gone to rehab—or at least that I was different. So I went straight back to partying and being insane.” That story gets told in all its messy glory (and embarrassment) on “Ring The Bell.” Rock bottom comes one night in downtown New York, chronicled in “The Fall.” Later, “Cowboy Heart” starts “with me walking down Hollywood Boulevard with seemingly everything I ever wanted in my life: a big career, fans that love to buy my music, money for the first time in my life, a home, a car, and so much more,” he says. “But then I realize I’ve never been more lost.” On the 11 o’clock number, “War Of The Worlds,” a vocal stacked Orville—clearheaded, sober, and calm—tackles the duality of man versus artist once more. The future is bright.

In its 13-song journey, Mule further cements Orville Peck’s singular lock on songwriting, storytelling, and song-making in this industry. Its depths reward multiple revisitations; its melodies and harmonies will continue to surprise and amaze with each repeated listen. Mule might find Orville, at times, at his lowest, but it finds him not only picking up the pieces, but a finding a better Orville along the way.