In Japanese Breakfast’s ‘Orlando in Love’ Video, a Friar Falls for a Siren

Japanese Breakfast have released a music video for their moody ballad “Orlando in Love,” its song title inspired by Renaissance poet Matteo Maria Boiardo’s “Orlando Innamorato.” In the music video, released Monday, frontwoman Michelle Zauner sings the delicate ballad, while bassist Jungle twirls in a gleaming seashell, emulating a siren.

“I fell in love with the title and envisioned a sort of whimsical, foolish male protagonist who lives by the sea in a Winnebago RV and is seduced by a siren,” Zauner said in a statement.

The music video, which feels pulled from the pages of a gothic novel, also draws from German painter Eduard von Grützner’s painting “The Connoisseur,” which led Zauner to picture Orlando as a “daydreaming friar” who searches for his love interest, a siren.

“After writing it, it felt like the perfect thesis statement for an album that is largely about people, often men, who find themselves seduced by temptation and are duly punished for it,” Zauner continued. 

“Orlando in Love,” the lead single from Japanese Breakfast’s fourth album For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women), was directed by Zauner and filmed by Peter Ash Lee, who shot the cover of their third album, Jubilee.

For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women) marks the band’s latest album since the release of their Grammy-nominated album Jubilee, which released in 2021, and the release of Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart. The new 10-track album arrives March 21 via Dead Oceans, and will include songs like “Men in Bars” featuring actor Jeff Bridges.

A film based on Zauner’s bestseller, Crying in H Mart, was announced in June 2021, with Will Sharpe, of White Lotus Season Two fame, announced to direct two years later. At the time, Zauner described finding a director a daunting task: “Someone who could honor my mother’s character and respect the darkest days of grief, and still make the coming of age of a half-Korean artsy outsider in a small Pacific Northwest hippie town seem real and cool.”

Japanese Breakfast will head on tour this spring in support of the album, with performances at Coachella in April and stops in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and Philadelphia. The American leg of the tour concludes in St. Paul, Minnesota, on Sept. 9.

From Rolling Stone US.