The video starts normal enough, but a surprise is waiting somewhere near the chorus.
Mikayla Khramov is strumming guitar strings on Instagram and singing the lyrics to the famous Dolly Parton song 9-to-5. Then, a moment later, a horse jumps in, lightly chomping on the guitar strings to change the chords.
In Mikayla’s world, it’s all part of the plan. Her vision of music is part therapy, part experimentation, part expression—but all of it in harmony.
“This is what music should be about,” Mikayla told USA Today. “And I don’t want to do anything without my horse now. He makes it more fun.”
Mikayla grew up around horses and decided to get back into riding in 2023. The Los Angeles singer-songwriter started volunteering with a horse rescue group in Moorpark, California, where she gets free riding lessons in exchange for her work.
While there, she met a stubborn, 7-year-old Kentucky-bred horse named Yupia. He wasn’t properly trained and seemed predisposed to biting people.
The horse didn’t seem to trust anyone, yet it wasn’t long before Mikayla fell in love with him.
Many months were required to breed familiarity and build trust in their relationship—but after nine months, a breakthrough occurred.
One day, Mikayla brought her instruments to the barn and started playing her guitar in the pasture. Yupia moved closer and started moving his mouth and snout onto the strings. Before long, Mikayla’s solo act became a duet.
“Music was the tool to help build trust,” Mikayla 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.”
Mikayla also plays the harp, so she started bringing that to the barn too, and Yupia would sidle over and start nuzzling his nose on the strings.
The sound wasn’t always great, but Mikayla felt like Yupia was conversing with each guitar strum, and the collaborations were rekindling Mikayla’s love of music and filling her with inspiration.
Music has always been in her blood, but all those gigs and all those bands can become a grind amidst a constant pursuit of paydays.
Perhaps she just needed a horse to bring the joy of music back to the forefront.
“(Yupia) has inspired me to love music again and not treat it like a job or just a way to make money,” Mikayla 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.”
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The joy is pushing Mikayla to create her first album while using some of Yupia’s sounds on the tracks. It’s going to be a broad, genre-bending experiment that blends Portuguese musicians with folk and electronic sounds, songwriting, guitar strums and of course, a horse.
She hopes to have it all finished in September. WATCH the video from Dodo…
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