Mikayla Khramov’s rescue horse album is shaping up to be one of the more unconventional debut records in recent memory: a genre-bending collection that features guitar and harp parts played, in part, by a seven-year-old Kentucky-bred horse named Yupia. The project grew out of something far more modest, a singer-songwriter bringing her instruments to a barn and watching a once-untrusting animal inch closer, note by note.
Nine months to build trust, one guitar to break through
Khramov, a Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, filmmaker and animal advocate, began volunteering with a horse rescue group in Moorpark, California, in 2023. The arrangement gave her free riding lessons in exchange for her time. It was there she met Yupia: stubborn, prone to biting, and, by her account, deeply reluctant to trust anyone.
Building a relationship took the better part of nine months. Then one afternoon, Khramov brought her guitar into the pasture and started playing. Yupia moved towards her, lowered his head and began mouthing the strings. What followed was not exactly a polished performance, but it was something.
‘Music was the tool to help build trust,’ Khramov told The Dodo in a YouTube video. ‘I didn’t give him treats or anything. It was kind of a miracle how it happened. He was almost like communicating or understanding me through the music.’
She also plays the harp, and that too made its way to the barn. Yupia would sidle across and nuzzle his nose along the strings. The sound wasn’t always harmonious, but Khramov felt that something real was being exchanged in those sessions.
From pasture sessions to the Mikayla Khramov rescue horse album
The collaborations rekindled something Khramov had been missing. A career of gigs and bands and the relentless pursuit of income had worn the joy out of music. Yupia, apparently, had other ideas.
‘(Yupia) has inspired me to love music again and not treat it like a job or just a way to make money,’ she said. ‘I go and I write music with him, and being at the barn (it’s a very inspiring place to write) and then he comes over and is participating with me, and it’s fun.’
That renewed energy is now being channelled into her first album, which will incorporate recordings of Yupia’s string interactions. The project is broad in its ambitions: folk textures sit alongside electronic sounds, and Portuguese influence runs through the compositions. According to the Times of India, Khramov is collaborating with musicians from Portugal to produce the final compositions, adding a transatlantic dimension to what began as a solo barn session.
Yupia’s contributions to those tracks are captured in the same informal, unforced way the partnership began: Khramov plays, the horse participates, and whatever emerges gets recorded. It is an approach that resists overthinking, which may be precisely the point.
The reach of their sessions has already extended beyond the barn. On Instagram, a video of Khramov strumming the Dolly Parton song ‘9 to 5’ while Yupia chomps the guitar strings to shift the chords drew wide attention. The clip captures the dynamic neatly: Khramov leads, Yupia intervenes at his own discretion, and the result is something neither planned.
‘This is what music should be about,’ Khramov told USA Today. ‘And I don’t want to do anything without my horse now. He makes it more fun.’
The work is not without its practical complications. Producing a coherent record from animal-assisted improvisation, folk songwriting and electronic production is a long way from conventional studio work. Blending those elements with contributions from Portuguese collaborators across different time zones adds further complexity to an already unusual project.
Khramov hopes to have the album finished by September. If Yupia keeps showing up to rehearsals, she has a co-writer on hand, nine months of earned trust in the room, and what may be the only horse in Los Angeles with a production credit to his name.
