The Star Prairie Project’s “Hello Darling” Finally Gets the Spotlight—and It Involves Aliens and Bananas

Some songs are instant hits. Others take their sweet time, marinating in the back of your mind until suddenly, they’re that song. “Hello Darling” by The Star Prairie Project is firmly in the second camp. Originally dropped in 2021 on their third album, Surreal, the track flew under the radar at first. But now? It’s staging a comeback, and it's bringing a damn alien with it.

Let’s rewind. Surreal wasn’t some throwaway project. The album stacked up nearly 4 million Spotify streams, anchored by standout tracks like “Hang in There Becca” (1.3M+ streams) and “Contemplating Plato”. “Hello Darling,” meanwhile, racked up a respectable 100K streams, but never quite got its flowers. That is, until now.

Fast forward to 2025. Co-writers Nolen R. Chew Jr. and Rudiger decided it was time for a glow-up. So they teamed up with LA screenwriter Kazie Kane and dropped a weirdly beautiful, low-key sci-fi music video that’s giving E.T. meets indie Americana. The concept? A mysterious alien crashes in Rudiger’s backyard. Flashlights, bananas, fire pits, and intergalactic bonding ensue.

What starts as eerie and ominous turns oddly tender. By the end, the alien, played by Kane herself, is vibing in the firelight like she’s been there all along. It’s strange, cinematic, and kinda emotional in a "wait, why am I crying over this alien friendship?" way. It’s also exactly the kind of unexpected twist Hello Darling deserved.

Now, the video’s getting its due—it’s officially nominated at the 2025 Tarzana International Film Festival. Not bad for a track that once lived in the shadows of its flashier album-mates.

If this is what late-bloomer success looks like, sign us up. “Hello Darling” isn’t just a song anymore. It’s a reminder that good art doesn’t expire. Sometimes it just needs a banana and a backyard alien to bring it home.

What made you revisit “Hello Darling” after a few years, and why now?

Nolen: ‘Hello Darling’ has had a life of its own, it seems. Sometimes a song can be a “late bloomer” and catch on with the listening public a while after it is released on an album. ‘Hello Darling’ is such a song. Originally released in September 2021 on The Star Prairie Project’s third album ‘Surreal’, the song garnered over 100,000 streams on Spotify but was buried among a solid 12-song field. Since its release, ‘Surreal’ has become the number one streamed Star Prairie Project album in its discography with almost four million streams on Spotify. ‘Surreal’ includes The Star Prairie Project’s biggest streamed song, ‘Hang in There Becca’, with over 1.3 million streams on Spotify alone. The album also included the hits, ‘Contemplating Plato” (688,364 streams) and ‘The Crying’ (636,313 streams). ‘Hello Darling’ was always one of our favorites, and we revived it as a music video because at the time we had submitted a couple of our music videos to some film festivals, and we just thought the song would make a great story, and Rudiger and Kazie had some great ideas, so we went for it.

How did the alien concept come together? Was it symbolic or just fun as hell?

Nolen: For the Hello Darling music video, we knew we wanted to take a different approach—something that felt more like a short film than a standard music video. The song has a dark, mysterious vibe, so we explored a few surreal concepts to match its tone. We ultimately narrowed it down to two ideas: an astronaut encountering a mysterious lizard woman on a distant planet, or a love story between a human man and a female alien who lands on Earth. After much back-and-forth—and discovering the perfect alien costume on Amazon—we went with the second concept. We shot the video at night to heighten the drama, and toward the end, we leaned into a Blair Witch Project meets Bigfoot huntaesthetic to inject a raw, chaotic energy into the final scenes.

Kazie Kane as the alien is such a vibe. What was it like working with her on set?

Nolen: The crazy thing is that I’ve never personally met Kazie or Rudiger. As a matter of fact, The Star Prairie Project is an entirely virtual recording project. But that’s another story. As far as Kazie is concerned, she has produced quite a few of our videos over the last couple of years. So if there is, for example, a twelve-song album in the works, we will try to create four music videos to accompany the four featured songs we are focusing on for pr and marketing. The music video aspect is hugely important because it provides the visual aspect in a personalized way. The listener can meet the band, so to speak, by watching the music videos.

What does this song represent to you now that it didn’t back in 2021?

Nolen: It’s gone through a couple of phases, I think. It’s always been about mystery and figurative language, but if one looks, the discerning listener will notice the entire lyrical theme is shadow and light.  That’s what makes it so murky and anomalous. So this is also the same aspects that led to the alien encounter motive or the new buzzword non-human intelligence (NHI). It’s a very now type of topic that just invites the type of music video Kazie and Rudiger created. So now I see the song in a deeper, more nuanced way.

If you could pick one more deep cut from Surreal to turn into a cinematic video, which would it be, and what’s the wild concept?

Nolen: Wow, that’s a great question. I think ‘The Crying’ would make a really cool cinematic video. It’s really a dystopian song about the fall of American democracy, and now we are literally there at that point in time, “it’s all over now but the crying”. It ended up being pretty prescient, ha! Anyway, I think that song would make a great music video.