By Gina Horan
Local Mount Dora Duo Flora’s Embrace Creates a Layered, Lasting Sound
Nineteen-year-olds Ryan Oldham and Easton Workman met in middle school and started making music in Ryan’s bedroom with an iPad and a shared love for layered soundscapes.
These refrains have grown into a lush, experimental, genre-blurring sound built on honesty, curiosity and a surprising willingness to evolve.
Ryan, now at Clemson University, is the band’s multi-instrumentalist and primary songwriter. Easton, named after the baseball bat, attends Lander University and handles drums.
Despite being miles apart during the school year, the two have maintained their creative momentum, writing and producing collaboratively across the distance.
“We’ve gotten good at adjusting,” Ryan says. “Sometimes we’ll record separately, other times we’ll just work for hours over FaceTime.”
That flexible, open approach has become the band’s quiet signature and lets the music evolve naturally wherever they are.
As for the name Flora’s Embrace, it wasn’t just a poetic choice from fiction. “It felt like a short story,” Easton says. “It’s about being open to everything, emotionally and creatively. That’s what we want the music to do.”
Their second album Sense the Petrichor captures that philosophy. The title, a nod to the earthy scent that follows rain, mirrors the album’s tone of being fresh, reflective and quietly stirring.
Songs shift textures with ease, moving from ambient and atmospheric to grounded and melodic. One track might echo the storytelling simplicity of Tom Petty, while the next leans into dream pop haze or indie rock grit.
“We don’t really worry about fitting into a genre,” Ryan says. “It just diverges.”
That freedom is evident in the album’s track list, which plays more like a mood journal than a traditional record.
Influenced by artists like Tame Impala, Twenty One Pilots and The Beatles, Ryan and Easton blend introspection with edge, layering lyrics that resonate with emotion but avoid cliché.
It’s not polish that sets them apart, but a rare self-awareness. At 19, they’re already comfortable with change and willing to shift direction if the music calls for it. That mindset, paired with their evolving sound, makes Flora’s Embrace promising.
“Each song is a time capsule of that moment,” Ryan says.
“Sense the Petrichor” is streaming now on Bandcamp.
Photos: Nicole Hamel
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Gina moved to Central Florida in August 2021 from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a degree in linguistics and worked as a fashion editor, photo stylist lifestyle columnist and food writer for the Knight Ridder Newspaper Group. She also covered and photographed music festivals, fashion shows and sports throughout Northern California. In 2000, she joined KSAN radio as a morning show co-host and produced the news and sports content there for four years. She later covered travel, events and the restaurant scene for KRON-Bay TV. A veteran bartender, Gina has worked in hospitality on and off since high school. She has been with Akers Media since 2022 and hosts the Healthy Living Central Florida podcast. Her passions include travel, road trips, baseball, history books and podcasts, tasting menus and arriving in a new city without a map or guidebook.
