Interview: Orland Sunset’s Music Careers Take Off “On the Run”

LA-based college seniors Amanda Flowers and Jacob Miller sit down with fellow class of 2024 member Arundhati Ghosh to lend insight into being college students and musicians simultaneously (and to talk about their recent collaboration with videographer Alex Di Marco!).

Written by Arundhati Ghosh

Photo courtesy of Rachel Yang

With their recent collaboration with Alex Di Marco not only on the books but out in the world, Amanda Flowers and Jacob Miller of Orland Sunset have added gas to their ascension in the music world. As they delve deeper into the music industry while simultaneously preparing to leave undergrad behind within the next few months, the dynamic duo continues to expand their audience and improve their music. Even though they’ve just put out “On the Run,” Flowers and Miller sat down with Digital Editor-in-Chief Arundhati Ghosh and discussed their musical process. 

Afterglow: How did you two meet and what brought y’all to deciding to collaborate on music?

Amanda: Okay, so we met our sophomore year of college — we’re seniors right now at Loyola Marymount University. We’re both recording arts majors, and we had to make Foley noises and we got paired up to crush cabbages together.

Jacob: We were doing sound for a scene from “The Vampire Diaries” where somebody grabs somebody’s heart and they rip it out, and we were using a cabbage for the sound. We were punching a cabbage and I punched it too hard —

Amanda: It was so gross. 

Jacob: And that was our first interaction together. The whole room smelled so bad [sic] of cabbage.

Amanda: It was disgusting. 

Jacob: We didn’t talk to each other for the next four to six months. And then we had another class together and a mutual friend in that class, so the three of us started hanging out and making music. We started working on songs together and it was fun. 

Amanda: Yeah, I never used to — I always used to write songs, but I never used to actually put my vocals over anything or have production elements. He met me and was like “Oh, I like your stuff, let’s work together,” and ever since then we’ve been working on music.

Jacob: Very glad I said that. 

I’m also a senior, so I know all about the class of 2024 hiring scaries. You’ve mentioned that you’re graduating this year — what are your plans after graduating? 

Jacob: The recording arts major is half film sound and half audio engineering for music. I personally want to go into the music industry as an audio engineer. I’m hoping to start working with some recording studios, doing some live sound gigs. I have an informal internship at a studio right now, but I’m hoping to get a more official position somewhere after college. 

Amanda: We’re definitely still going to work on Orland Sunset too. I kind of like the business side of things — I’ve been on the business side of Orland Sunset so, doing more of that in the music industry like A&R. That kind of stuff would be really cool.

Jacob: I handle all the music production and engineering side of OS. She does the managerial/marketing side. We do songwriting together and some of the other stuff. We’ll definitely keep working on OS — we did three music videos in the past year, and we’d like to do more. Hopefully, we’ll put out an album. 

Is [putting an album out] what you’re most looking forward to? I know you guys have a couple of singles out, and you just released “On the Run.” When you put out an EP, will you include the songs you already have out on it or entirely new stuff? 

Jacob: It’ll be new stuff.

Amanda: We have so much stuff that we’re sitting on!

Jacob: We both also do solo music. We put the most songs out under Amanda’s name, and about 2 out under mine. One of [the songs] under Amanda made it onto Spotify’s “Fresh Finds” about a year ago, which was cool. 

“Orland Sunset” is a really pretty name — who came up with it, and what does the name mean to you? What was the process of deciding an artist/group name like? 

Amanda: It’s such a stressful process coming up with a band name or any name because it’s such a big thing. He lives on Sunset Ave. in Santa Monica. 

Jacob: I grew up in Santa Monica and grew up in a house on Sunset Avenue. She’s from Orland Park, Illinois. We took the Orland from Orland Park and Sunset from where I grew up.

Amanda: Fun fact — Route 66 began in Illinois around my town —

Jacob: And it ends in Santa Monica where I’m from. It kinda connects our two hometowns. 

I love that — that’s very cool. How would you describe your music so far? What genres do y’all cover and how do you plan to evolve?

Jacob: I hate boxing myself into one genre — I like making all sorts of stuff. I think we definitely are trying to live in Indie Pop and Bedroom Pop. I like to incorporate a lot of electronic and dance and hip-hop elements in the stuff we do, too.

Amanda: We love all genres, which has transformed into us working on every kind of music at one point. 

Jacob: Some of our stuff — like “Butterflies” — has some electronic, dancey elements, but it’s also got guitar. Sticking in that lane of electronic, pop, Indie stuff is what we’re going for. 

I think the melding of genres works so well — I wanted to interview you guys in part because of how much I liked the multiple influences on all of your songs. 

Jacob: Thank you.

Amanda: Thank you!

Y’all have some exciting news! You just had a song — and its music video — drop two days ago, and I believe Alex Di Marco worked on it. How did you guys catch his eye and get into contact with him, and what was the collaboration process like? 

Amanda: That was so cool. I was in a business class — ’cause I’m also a double major in business. It was like [sic] a Wednesday night, and we had just released the video for “Butterflies” and “Who am I?” which was a combined video. We released it a week before Alex reached out to us. I got a DM on my break between my two-hour class, and I was like… “Who is this guy? Two-time platinum music video maker? This cannot be real.” I looked into him and his Instagram and it was real!

He created the “Location” video for Khalid and “I Like Me Better” by LAUV. And shit, I loved the “Location” video. When he reached out, I was like, “Holy shit, how did he even find us?” We called him two days later, and he chatted with us about wanting to make a video just for us. I asked him how he found us, and he said it was some for you page —

Jacob: I think it was his Instagram explore page, yeah. 

Amanda: It showed us that you need the right people seeing your content. We’re really small, but someone who’s in the industry can see our stuff. That’s the beauty of social media.

Jacob: The positive side of it! The video process itself was super smooth, super easy.

Amanda: What a talented guy. 

Jacob: Definitely one of the best productions I’ve been a part of. We shot the whole thing in less than three hours. 

Oh — oh, wow.

Amanda: Right? He played all the bad guys in the video.

Wait — all three? That’s crazy. 

Amanda: Yes.

Jacob: All three of the people that aren’t us are Alex. 

Amanda: And he shot it all!

Jacob: He didn’t bring any other crew members, it was just him and us, and we just knocked it out.

Amanda: He showed it at some VMAs after-party before it was completely finished, and people were asking about the bad guys. And he said they were all him and I was like… “what?”

I would not have guessed that! I don’t even think I would’ve thought to ask. 

Amanda: It was so random but he had a vision!

Jacob: We had a few meetings about what we wanted it to be like, fleshing out the story and the idea. I think he’s had this idea for a music video for a while and was looking for the right people to execute it with. Our song and our vibes fit so we went for it. It was a really fun shoot.

It seemed like it! There are a lot of cool stylistic choices like the video quality being video-camera-esque, the onomatopoeia of the gun sounds showing up in the captions alongside whenever your characters gained money, etc. It’s different from what Alex has done before, but you can see his signature style in it. What aspects of his style caught you guys’ eyes, and how did they impact the style of the video?How did y’all feel about it when it came together?

Amanda: We’re not visual people at all — or, well, maybe [Jacob is] —

Jacob: I’m a very auditory person. I have trouble visualizing things in my head.

Amanda: We gave [Alex] free rein. We told him to do what he does best, and we’d stay out of it. 

Jacob: We didn’t see it until it was finished. He had total creative freedom. 

Amanda: I feel like any input from us would’ve ruined it, you know what I mean? 

Jacob: Yeah, and once we saw it, there’s nothing I would change. We didn’t even have the finished song when we shot it — Alex had a demo of it. After we shot the video, I told him to work on the video and that I’ll finish the song, and that we could bring it together in the end. He said he finished the video, and I wasn’t quite finished with the mix yet. A few weeks later, he kept working on it after it was finished. He put a lot of work in, and it really shows.

It was really, really cool. I’m not a visual person either — I mean, I write for this website. We have people that are incredible with design, but I’m not one of them. Apart from the video, do you want to talk about the lyrical and mixing processes of “On the Run” and give insight into that creative process?

Amanda: We first worked on “On the Run” like a year ago.

Jacob: It wasn’t this summer but the last summer. I think I wrote the beat and worked on the hook and sent it to you while you were in Illinois. I made the beat here in LA and recorded the first version of the hook. Then I sent that whole demo to Amanda while she was home for the summer and she wrote the first verse, recorded it on her own, then sent it back to me. We just had that initial first verse and hook demo.

Amanda: And I kind of wrote it because — I was going through a break up during that [time]. It was rough, and I was so spiteful.

That’s real.

Amanda: I was thinking, what would I do? I would show up at this guy’s house — and I never did, I’m too shy — but I wanted to show up at his house in the middle of the night with a toolkit and a rusty club and break something of his. I just wanted to ruin this man. One of the lines says “karma isn’t quick enough” and I really believe it, because people are so mean sometimes. I believe in karma but sometimes it doesn’t happen quick enough, so you have to do something on your own about it, which I never do. That’s where my verse took that very dramatic turn.

Jacob: I built off of that with the hook about running away and wanting to be with somebody. 

Do you think that’s a little bit of a lyrical departure from the previous three songs y’all have out as Orland Sunset? Is that something you might explore more?

Amanda: I love the way “On the Run” expanded my lyrics, because I never really wrote in that super dramatic sense of doing something to someone, like showing up at someone’s house. It’s fun to envision yourself in a different scenario than you would ever be in, in real life. I love writing in very dramatic senses. 

Jacob: We have a lot of songs in the works about bad relationships in that sense. It’s a step in a different direction from the stuff we’ve released previously.

Amanda: It’s darker… I showed my grandma the video [for “On the Run”] and she said, “Amanda this is so scary!” I think it’s a good thing if grandma thinks it’s scary. It’s what I was going for!

Jacob: At first, I envisioned Orland Sunset as this bright, Indie, beachy thing, but I like that we have a darker direction.

Amanda: Yeah, then you get broken up with, and the beachy feeling goes away.

Jacob: We still have some beachy, Indie stuff that’ll come out.

What can your growing audience expect from you guys in the coming future? I know you mentioned an EP, but what about performances?

Amanda: More videos for sure, and definitely more performances. I’ve been working on that a little bit. We just want more songs under our name. 

Jacob: We’re trying to build up a catalog of our solo music and our duo music so we have enough music for a set. We’re working on building up a catalog, and I think that’s our main focus. 

Amanda: Visuals, too. We have so many friends that are photographers. Especially once we graduate… school takes up so much time. I’m bittersweet about graduating, but at the same time, I want to be done so I can work on this more. 

Jacob: It does. And it’s nice to take fun classes like film photography, but at the same time, if I was putting all that time into music, it would help a lot.

Amanda: We definitely need more sleep. 

Especially us… I mean, we started college during a pandemic.

Amanda: We don’t talk about that first year and a half enough.

Jacob: Time still doesn’t really move the same. 

Amanda: I still feel 16, sometimes. 

I was about to say the exact same thing. I do not feel 22.

Amanda: No, no… I can’t believe I’m 22. Where did all that time go? That’s a different conversation, though. 

I totally get it. Will y’all stay in LA, post-graduation?

Amanda: Yeah.

Jacob: Yes. We’re both trying to get into the music industry as artists and engineers and writers. As people, it makes sense to be here in LA. Plus, my family’s here. It’s nice to stay here and be able to see my dog whenever I want to. 

Amanda: There’s so many connections here, especially music. Alex doesn’t live too far away from us.

Did y’all film on-site at your university, or was it a rent-out place?

Jacob: It was in downtown LA. We rented this event space, some building made to look like a mansion inside. It looked pretty cool. They had a statue of David with a gold penis. The decorations were really interesting. We rented it for three hours — a bit of the [video] was shot in my car, but the rest of it was there.

Amanda: It was just so smooth. 

Jacob: It was the quickest, easiest video shoot I was ever a part of.

Is there anything else y’all want people to know?

Jacob: Sign up for our newsletter! Check out our website!

Amanda: Collaborating with people would be cool, too. 

Jacob: If any artists want to do songs together, we’d be more than happy to collaborate! People can look forward to more OS stuff soon. We aren’t stopping!

You can follow Orland Sunset on Instagram and at their website, and stream their music on Spotify and Apple Music.

This interview has been minimally edited for clarity and length.