Mia x Ally's Viral Hits are born of friendship (2024)

Mia x Ally is a folk supergroup (superduo?) of sorts comprised of Mia Asano on electric violin and Ally the Piper on bagpipes. Thanks to a robust TikTok following and a series of viral videos wherein the pair have covered both the Charlie Daniels Band and Dragonforce (among many equally diverse selections), they’ve become sensations both on their own and together. Mia x Ally is a force with which to be reckoned and it’s not for nothing that their debut album, Mia x Ally: The Viral Hits, hit number six on the Billboard Classical Crossover charts when it dropped just last week.

Thus, the pair’s appearance at the VooDoo Lounge in Harrah’s Casino this Friday, November 10, is kind of a big deal. The pair brings a band backing their already robust violin and bagpipe sound, meaning Mia x Ally are ready to rip it up. We hopped on Zoom with them ahead of the album’s release to talk about how this all came to happen.

The Pitch: You two met via TikTok and now you’re hanging out in person, which I feel is not like a thing that happens regularly.

Mia: No, especially during the pandemic like, which is the reason a lot of us started posting on that app.

Everything was completely remote. All of our collaboration started out remotely and then I was living in Boston and Ally happened to have a gig there. And that’s when we met up in person for the first time.

Ally: Yeah, so that was my first time collaborating with an online friend who I had made. I was down there doing a Barstool Sports event for St. Patrick’s Day and Mia is one of the only online content creators I knew in the city. I was like, “This is going to be a missed opportunity if I don’t reach out,” so I reached out, asked if we want to do a content creation day. She was super down and we made six or seven videos and almost all of them went viral.

Immediately after that, we decided we were going to turn two of them into full versions and music videos and that didn’t end up coming to fruition, but we didn’t let it get us down. We just kept pushing and pushing and pushing because we really wanted to put out something full together.

Mia: Then we went on tour with a friend of ours, and that was the first time we performed live together for an audience and there was this amazing chemistry between us on stage that like felt so magical because we had this ldueling element to the way we play, but also this friendship that was starting to solidify. So we were like, “Dang, this actually works really well together and the violin and the bagpipes work really well somehow,” and it just kind of grew from there and we started making music together.

This album is called The Viral Hits, but you’ve got a couple songs that you haven’t done videos for yet, which is a very forward way of thinking just because it means now you’ve got videos that people are going to be excited waiting for.

Mia: Totally. The two songs, we’ve never done together. Oh yeah. We’ve only done separately. It’s a few songs. It’s “Roundtable Rival,” by Lindsey Stirling, which Ally has covered and did have a lot of traction on that video, but I’ve never played that one actually on the internet. And then “Cliffs of Dover,” which we’ve both covered separately, but never together, by Eric Johnson.

And then it’s this song called “Iridium” by The Sidh, which is an electronic bagpipe rock band. We’re both huge fans of that band and they’re friends of ours, actually. We just love that song and realized that both of us love that song. That’s why we decided to cover that on the album.

Ally: It was a nod to the artists who’ve popularized our instruments in that kind of mainstream way. Then we put our duo twist on it. So now an electric violin song has bagpipes on it and a bagpipe song has electric violin on it.

Mia: That’s why it was so important for us to put that on our album alongside “Freebird” and Devil Went Down to Georgia” and all the crowd pleaser favorites that you know and love.

How’d you come to like cover all of those “crowd pleaser” songs? It’s a really diverse array of tunes but they all work together on the album, which I wouldn’t have guessed from things that have been from various TikTok and YouTube videos.

Mia: I think the way they work is that, again, we put our spin on it, like Ally said, like, completely, we put our whole hearts and souls into this and made it so that it’s just us. That’s where the cohesiveness happens on the album, even though the songs are completely different genres.

Ally: Yeah, we wrote some of the solo parts and we did a lot of the arranging and some of the timing is different than the originals because it’s more us and it’s more our instruments. It really coalesces the themes of the whole album, even though the originals wouldn’t probably flow through together.

But all of those, for the most part, came from audience and follower recommendations. That’s how both of us really started doing what we do online is we posted a video, it happened to go viral and then we leaned into it and said, “What do you want to hear next?” and it was people from all walks of life because that’s the beauty of having a social media following. The Viral Hits is very much chosen and selected by our listeners, which makes it another level of touching and special.

Mix x Ally play the VooDoo Lounge at Harrah’s on Friday, November 10. Details on that show here.