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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, AUGUST 7, 2021
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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, AUG. 7, 2021 • B1
INSPIRED BY
THE LANDSCAPE
ABOVE: The cover for Desolation Horse’s new album.
BELOW: Cooper Trail is a musician whose roots trace back to Idaho.
Local musician records album
By MORGAN GRINDY
For The Astorian
W
hen home was a tour van and his closet a
small duffl e bag, Cooper Trail found the
landscapes of the West inviting and inspir-
ing . He liked the desolate ones.
Traveling through the desert, he scribbled the
design of a cartoon horse with a smiley face on its
head on a piece of paper. He added the word “deso-
lation,” scrawled across the body of the horse. The
doodle later became a tattoo, and the inspiration
for his band’s name, Desolation Horse.
Desolation Horse started in 2019, when Trail
took a break from the band he started in high
school, Mise, and toured as a drummer for Matia,
Bart Budwig and Erisy Watt across Oregon.
“Before I knew it, I had an album. And pretty
much on a whim I decided to release it under a new
name, to kind of separate it from the older stuff ; it’s
a pretty diff erent strain of music, to me, anyway,”
Trail said .
See Album, Page B4