Keith Samland of Alienstone | Matt Connarton Unleashed

0:00 Speaker 1: Hm. I really like that a lot.

0:01 Speaker 2: The track is Breathe, the artist is Alienstone, and we're going to talk with the gentleman behind that project in just a moment.

0:08 Speaker 1: But welcome everybody.

0:09 Speaker 2: We have entered our number two numarrow Doos of Matt Connorton Unleashed. For those of you listening live today is Saturday, September thirteen, twenty twenty five, and we come to you from the studios of wm NH ninety five point three FM and Glorious Manchester, New Hampshire. Jenny is here, of course at the news table, and of course hello to everybody listening online or even around the globe. Matt connorton dot Com. Slash live is how the easiest way to get the show from anywhere, so we appreciate all of you who tune in with us.

0:39 Speaker 2: And let's go ahead. I'm gonna bring this mic up and we're gonna talk with mister Keith Samland, the gentleman behind Alien Stone.

0:47 Speaker 3: Keith, are you there? I am, How you doing good?

0:50 Speaker 1: Good?

0:50 Speaker 4: So?

0:50 Speaker 2: I know you can't see us on video, but I can see you on video and you look like you're in a radio studio and I saw something online.

0:57 Speaker 1: Do you also do a radio show.

0:59 Speaker 5: Yes, upright, mo own internet radio station for about the past eleven twelve years outstanding.

1:05 Speaker 3: I have a show too, Oh very cool.

1:07 Speaker 2: Very cool, and what's the station and what's the show called.

1:11 Speaker 1: Let's give that a plug.

1:12 Speaker 2: Just partly for selfish reasons, I do want to talk to you about the music, but also as a radio guy, I'm just super curious about what you do as a broadcaster too.

1:20 Speaker 3: For sure.

1:20 Speaker 5: The station's called alien X Radio okay, and the show that I currently do is called Inside the Mothership okay. And I used to do interviews and all kinds of stuff with movie stars and things like that, but as of late, it's just become mostly just like comedy and entertainment show.

1:36 Speaker 1: Oh interesting, I'm gonna have to check that out. Very cool.

1:40 Speaker 2: So I have questions about Alien Stone, and a big one and part of the reason I picked that track, and I chose another song too that will play at the end of our conversation that I really like. But I love your sound. I love the songs. I'm particularly taken with the sound of the guitar. Is that you on lead guitar and all.

2:00 Speaker 5: These I did everything on these songs with the exception of leads and solos. Okay, what I did is I went through all of the bands that I've played with through you know, different bands that have played shows with me, and I've gotten their guitar players from all the local bands and had them all individuals, each one of these tracks as a completely different person playing on it.

2:19 Speaker 1: Gotcha.

2:19 Speaker 5: So they all contributed these from their home studios and sent them over and I chopped them up, spliced them and put them together, and I got different. That's how I got such different flavor throughout the course of the album.

2:28 Speaker 2: That makes sense because I really love the guitar tone on that track Breathe And is his name David Quick?

2:35 Speaker 1: Is that how you say his name?

2:36 Speaker 3: David Schwick?

2:37 Speaker 1: Oh Schwick? Okay, yeah, I wasn't sure.

2:41 Speaker 5: The crazy thing about that, too, is that he's actually one of the most talented drummers that I've ever met, and I didn't even know he played guitar, and now he's the he's the drummer of a band called Sonic Smut in this area right now.

2:53 Speaker 3: But that's how a drummer plays guitar really.

2:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, wow, Yeah, he's really good. Yeah, and it uh, you know, it fits the song perfectly, and I love the I love the tone.

3:05 Speaker 1: Everything about it is is so good.

3:08 Speaker 2: And tell us about I mean again, I listened to the you Know You sound Us a whole album. I listened to the entire album. It's funny because we had kind of talked I'll pull the curtain back a little bit. Uh, we kind of talked online about you know.

3:21 Speaker 6: Uh.

3:22 Speaker 2: One of the songs you gave me a four warning has a word in it that we would have to make a radio edit of I and I was willing to do that, but then, you know, I listened to the whole album and it's like, well, there's so much great stuff here, there's no reason to even bother making a radio edit of that song because there's no shortage of great songs here.

3:37 Speaker 1: So I that.

3:39 Speaker 2: So I picked a Breath to open with, and I'm gonna play criticize yourself at the end of the segment because I love that one too. Those are my two favorites. So selfishly, I picked my two personal two favorites. But but I'm curious about your creative process, and it sounds like you do all the production yourself.

3:54 Speaker 1: Is that correct?

3:55 Speaker 3: Yep?

3:55 Speaker 5: Right here where I'm sitting right now, is where I did all of the production on that whole album. Yeah, ye, recorded everything in myself. I used Superior drummer to program and edit all the drums. I recorded my own bass tracks, my own rhythms on the acoustic and actually all the vocal tracks, I recorded scratch tracks that I was going to re record later, and I ended up just cleaning them up and using the ones that were already in there. Okay, okay, so everything was a one take on all the vocals.

4:22 Speaker 2: Okay, Wow, Have you ever done this before? Or is Alien Stone this album? And by the way, what's the.

4:29 Speaker 1: Name of the album?

4:30 Speaker 3: The album's called After the Gray.

4:32 Speaker 1: After the Gray is After the Gray?

4:34 Speaker 2: Is this the first album where you've done that or have you released previous work where you've done all the production?

4:40 Speaker 5: Well, I it was kind of a collaborative effort. But I was in a band for about twenty years called Freak Stark and not to be confused with the current Freak Star out of Los Angeles. But yeah, we were together for about twenty years and we got into recording our own stuff too, But of course it was much harder to do back then with the equipment. You know, it's much easier to do today. You can do with a laptop and you know, a very small mixer. So I and I also went to as you can see, I am into radio, so I went to radio school, so I know about mixing and and you know, engineering and all that kind of stuff.

5:11 Speaker 5: So it just it made it much easier when the technology caught up to me and what I wanted to do.

5:16 Speaker 1: Absolutely.

5:17 Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an amazing time to be alive, isn't it in terms of technology? And oh, for sure the things you can do now really because.

5:25 Speaker 5: That great track that was was given to me in many many takes from someone who never even came into my studio, recorded at elsewhere and just emailed it over, you know. So that's that's huge. Yeah, And had to get a bunch of people in a room.

5:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, especially when you come out with something that sounds like it was recorded, you know, with a live band in a studio.

5:44 Speaker 1: I mean, that's that's fantastic.

5:45 Speaker 2: So so that that's a good good for you being able to do that.

5:50 Speaker 1: And then and then you mentioned so you you recorded everything else.

5:55 Speaker 5: Yeah, pretty much everything else on there was me with the exception of piano that that came from another gentleman. That he's the lead singer and piano player for a band called Sweet Crystal, which is a Detroit Detroit Music Award winning band for the last thirty years. I mean, he's a huge, huge artist around the Detroit area.

6:13 Speaker 2: Okay, that's obviously very satisfying when you can do all of that yourself, I assume. I mean, did you feel any pressure putting this album together because so much of it was on you? Or maybe you did and you thrive on it, or maybe you didn't and you just enjoyed being able to have such autonomy and so much control.

6:30 Speaker 1: I mean, what was what was that like?

6:32 Speaker 2: Did you feel any pressure or was it just like, yeah, I'm just gonna do this mostly myself.

6:37 Speaker 5: That that was the best thing about it is that there was nobody on my heels. There was nobody saying, hey, we got a deadline. We got to get this done. You know, someone's coming over to do the bass tracks. We got to get them all done today, right. There wasn't any of that. You know, if I came home and I was tired, I just didn't do anything. I went to bet you know, if it takes me a year to record it. It takes me a year. I don't even know how long it took me. I didn't even pay attention to that.

6:58 Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And is this your first because a project officially is called alien Stone, is this your first project that you've recorded as alien Stone?

7:09 Speaker 5: Well, I did something a long time ago when a freestar had like a hiatus in the middle where I did my own kind of thing on the side, and it was under the name alien Stone. But it was very, very different from this, and it was much lower on the production scale. It was kind of like a techno e beat kind of thing with a lot of heavy guitar on it. Yeah, and yeah, I just it never really released or anything anyway, so I don't really count it right right.

7:34 Speaker 1: Where does the name come from, alien Stone?

7:36 Speaker 5: It actually comes from all the way back in high school. This would have been like eighty eight eighty nine. I took a media production class and we were supposed to write and produce a small video, and I wrote a script that would have required me to get about thirty or forty million dollars, So I never made the movie. But it was about a meteorite that falls into Los Angeles and an alien comes to retrieve it because it's some kind of power source, and he goes a murderous spree to retrieve the alien stone.

8:02 Speaker 5: Okay, it's just stuck ever since.

8:05 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all right. And the album is called After the Gray? Where does that come from?

8:10 Speaker 3: That's actually uh.

8:11 Speaker 5: In one of the songs there's the title says, after the Gray, maybe there'll be some kind of light, Okay, And that's basically what the song was about. All this crap that happens to you, is like, well, maybe after this crap passes, you know, there'll be something better after that. So after the Gray, maybe there'll be some kind of light.

8:29 Speaker 2: So are these songs? Are they reflective of things that you've been through? Because in listening to the lyrics, I do feel like, you know, these aren't you know, they're not just simple feel good rock songs.

8:42 Speaker 1: There.

8:43 Speaker 2: I feel like I feel like there's some heavy stuff behind the lyrics of these songs. It definitely, you know, without I mean, you know, there's ambiguity. And of course, one of the wonderful things about music or any kind of art is that you can kind of interpret it however you want to. And sometimes people different people find different meanings behind different you know, the lyrics to different songs and so forth. But my impression because I listened to the entire thing in one sitting, you know, I wasn't like, Okay, I'm gonna listen to a song now and I'll listen to another one later.

9:11 Speaker 2: So I listened to the full thing, from front to back, and I felt like there's a story there, like like there's something that you're getting out, but I'm curious about that.

9:21 Speaker 5: Yeah, there's definitely a lot of heavy lyrics. I've been criticized by a lot of people saying, can you write a happy song? I'd be like, if there's any happiness inside me, I want to keep it there, keep it inside.

9:32 Speaker 1: You know.

9:32 Speaker 5: If I get all this heaviness that's thrown on me from the world, let's let's get that out through the therapy of music, let's remove that. You know what I'm saying. Right, So, I don't need to write a happy song. I just live the happy stuff. But you know, yeah, the darker stuff. If you don't talk about the things that get to you, that the things that bring you down, then it's just going to keep you down. So that's pretty much you know what I do. It's like, if something bothers me enough to wear I'm thinking about it a lot, then then yeah, it's going to translate into the music.

10:03 Speaker 5: You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna write a story about you know, what once was that is no more or something that has changed for the not for the better. M you know that that's you know, that's that's gonna come out that way. I have one song that's on there. It's called long Way Home, which is basically about thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. So you take this long journey going around trying to find something better, and then you find out that everything that was better was actually at home, so you're right back where you started.

10:30 Speaker 5: You took the long way home. So that's not really a dark story. That's like, hey, you just you didn't know now you do.

10:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's relatable, you know, because I think we can all we can all relate to that, uh you know, at some point in our lives.

10:44 Speaker 1: So certainly.

10:45 Speaker 2: But I like too that you use the word therapy when you're talking about about, you know, songs about dark subjects and so forth, because something that comes up on this show a lot because we talk about music, we also talk about mental health and uh, something that comes up on the show a lot is how creating art, whether it be music or you know, visual art Jenny as you know, she's a visual artist, or whatever it is that you're creating.

11:08 Speaker 1: It's it's a way.

11:09 Speaker 2: I think it's the best form of therapy, right because you're you're working whatever it is that you need to work out through creating something. Not only are you creating something that ultimately that helps you, it helps you to express yourself, but it also helps others because then they are able to relate to what you've created. And I'm sure I don't know if it's happened to you. I assume it has. Maybe you've heard from someone who said, you know, hey, I listened to this song and I get what you're saying, and I really relate to it and it kind of helped me, helped me feel better, help me feel like I'm not alone, whatever it is, right, So I think that that's you know, the best form of therapy is to is to create.

11:46 Speaker 2: And if you can take your pain, your trauma, whatever it is that you've been through, or maybe you're just upset about something going on in the.

11:53 Speaker 1: World, whatever it is, If you're able to take.

11:55 Speaker 2: That and then make something out of it, create something from it, you've taken something this negative, but you've done something positive with it by creating something.

12:04 Speaker 3: Yeah.

12:05 Speaker 5: And also, like you said that, if somebody else listens to it and they say, hey, I you know, connected with you on this level, it's like, okay, but you wouldn't have, right. You know, you had no idea that this person was on the same level with you, that was there right there with you. But you didn't know until you said something in the form of a song or a poetry or a painting or whatever. Then somebody looks at it and goes, you know what, I feel the same way, and it's like, okay, well I had no idea you did.

12:28 Speaker 5: Now at least I have a kindred spirit. I now feel like there's more people with me instead of against me.

12:35 Speaker 1: Right exactly exactly.

12:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, do you play any of these songs out or I mean with all these guest musicians, Maybe that's challenging to pull that off.

12:45 Speaker 1: I don't know, But do you perform any of these live?

12:48 Speaker 3: Yes?

12:48 Speaker 5: Actually, what I did is since I'm the one that was in charge of producing the album. I was also the one in charge of rendering the tracks. When I was done, so of course I had rendered the entire album, and then I went through and muted the acoustic guitar and the vocals and rendered it again. Okay, So I load that onto a loop pedal and I can go out to any place I want now hit the track and it plays everything with the exception of my acoustic guitar and my vocals, and I can just play right along.

13:13 Speaker 1: Oh that's great.

13:13 Speaker 2: And you know, once again, it's an amazing time to be alive, isn't it with all this technology.

13:17 Speaker 3: Yeah, that was not available. That was not available.

13:20 Speaker 5: You had to come out there with a reel to reel and all kinds of crazy stuff.

13:25 Speaker 1: That's great.

13:26 Speaker 2: They were able to do that, So, uh, does anything ever go wrong with that? By the way, when you're when you're you know, trying to play to these loops.

13:34 Speaker 5: And uh, the only time it really went bad is before I'm not I use loop pedal itself, which plays the wave file straight from there, and that pretty much is solid.

13:44 Speaker 1: Okay.

13:44 Speaker 3: But I used to use a laptop.

13:46 Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know how laptops are, Yeah, you know, right in the middle of a song and goes, we're gonna do an update in the middle, Like, dude, you didn't even ask me, you just we're restarting your computer.

13:57 Speaker 1: Really yeh, yeah up, or.

14:00 Speaker 5: You'll get a notification or something, but right in the middle of your song, you're like, that's not cool it I deleted those.

14:06 Speaker 3: I thought I turned those off.

14:08 Speaker 2: I mean, if you're a if you're a DJ, you know, you could say, oh, it's the part of the remix or whatever if it suddenly goes meek.

14:14 Speaker 1: But if you're you know, you're playing a rock song, you.

14:17 Speaker 3: Know, and you get to know a critical error.

14:19 Speaker 2: Yes, but but it sounds like so now it works pretty It all works pretty smoothly though.

14:28 Speaker 3: Yeah, it's pretty solid.

14:29 Speaker 5: When you when you you have to actually hit the button to stop it. Now, yeah, you know it's not gonna just empower would have to go out?

14:36 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, when you when you play out, are people ever surprised because obviously, you know a lot of people who maybe haven't seen someone play with loop pedals and so forth. You know, they might see you with your acoustic guitar and think that you know, that's going to be it and not that there would be anything wrong with that, But are do you ever see people in the audience who are just surprised when they, you know, when they start to hear these other instruments and these other and they realize that it's actually a bigger production, so to speak, then maybe what they were expecting.

15:07 Speaker 5: That's always the case when somebody who hasn't seen me at first, they think I'm gonna come up there and do some Hank William seeing your tear and my beer kind of stuff, right, and you know, and there's nothing wrong with that either, you know, IF's and there's other people at these shows too that do that kind of music. So maybe somebody right before them just did that, and then I come up there and they think, Okay, this is gonna be a continuation. And then all of a sudden they hear the drums kick in and a and a big fat bass kick in, and you've that guitar solo that you just heard on that song.

15:33 Speaker 5: You know, they're not expecting any of that, yeah, and it kind of shocks them a little bit.

15:38 Speaker 3: First, dude.

15:39 Speaker 5: Sometimes they're like, are you just playing along with your album? And sometimes I actually have to explain to people it's like no, what I'm playing is live. Yeah, that's removed from the sound.

15:47 Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.

15:49 Speaker 2: Do you ever, I mean, do you have any thoughts of putting together a band to play these? Or obviously doing it yourself? It gives you a lot of freedom and autonomy, and if you want book shows, you don't have to check with three or four other people what their schedules are. So I so maybe this, maybe this is a pointless question, but I am curious. I mean, have you thought about trying to put together a band to play these?

16:13 Speaker 5: Yeah, I've I'm always open to that idea. But it you know, something that I've learned from being in bands for, you know, thirty plus years, is that, you know, the more people you get into a band, the more schedules you have to coordinate. Everybody has wives and lives and husbands and car problems and jobs and vacation time and all that kind of stuff. And to get five people in a band and have all that lineup so that you can record and you can do a show, it's really hard.

16:44 Speaker 3: It's really hard.

16:45 Speaker 5: And then on top of that, you've got egos and personalities that you also have to get along with, and it makes it very, very difficult. So I'm always open to the idea. But then you've got to find somebody who's willing to play my music and then move forward writing stuff yeah together, you know, don't change what I've already written. That's already done, right, you know, So you've got to be willing to do that. And a lot of people are like, no, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be in the Dave Matthews band, you know, right, And I'm like, no, that's what I'm not trying to do that either, you know.

17:15 Speaker 2: Yeah, where are you from, Keith? I? I just realized too, I never asked you where where are you located?

17:23 Speaker 1: Exactly?

17:24 Speaker 5: Well, I'm originally from Westland, Michigan, but I moved over to Taylor, Michigan, which is a suburb of Detroit, pretty close to Detroit.

17:31 Speaker 3: Okay, be there in about ten minutes if I chose to go.

17:34 Speaker 2: Well, you're a you're in an area then you're you know, being close to Detroit where. I mean a lot of great music obviously is come out of that region. I mean you must have. I mean, what's the music scene like there right now? I mean there must just be talent everywhere I would guess.

17:49 Speaker 3: Yeah.

17:50 Speaker 5: I do a lot of open mic nights obviously, you know, because that's the easiest thing for me. I go to places like Grizzlies and Windott or Three Nicks in Allen Park. But like the place I go to, it's a bar. It's called road Rangers, and it's and Taylor and this bar is set up as a concert bar. I mean it has the full backing line, the full everything. I mean, anybody can play there. Docing could play there tomorrow and it would sound great. Yeah, you know what I'm saying, Well, the sound would be great.

18:14 Speaker 5: I don't know if Docing would be great, but.

18:17 Speaker 1: Yeah, depends if George Leitch's and the band or not.

18:20 Speaker 3: Right.

18:21 Speaker 5: So when I go and play there, it's like the bands that come through that bar because of the fact that it has such good sound and you don't have to sell tickets and you don't have to be part of a national thing. There's a lot of huge talent that comes through that that bar. You know, bands like the Creeping Chaos is around here right now. That's an enormous band. And the band's like whole shot the WRF, which is a huge radio station around here. They constantly hire that band to play all their events.

18:47 Speaker 5: Oh yeah, so yeah, there's a lot of really good bands that come through there.

18:51 Speaker 2: Yeah. It's something that we talk about on the show quite a bit.

18:55 Speaker 1: Is you know.

18:55 Speaker 2: Every around here, you know, because sometimes people will ask us, they ask me, or they'll ask Jenny because she does the booking. You know, how do you find all this great talent? And it's like, well, it's everywhere, you know, And I think that's true of probably every city, in every town in the country. You know, there's there's local musicians who are doing great stuff. And if you you know, because sometimes people, you know, they get to a certain point in their lives where they sort of say, Okay, all the music that I've heard up to this point in my life, that's all the music I ever need to hear, and anything made after this point I'm not going to listen to.

19:27 Speaker 2: I'm going to reject, you know. And people who do that, they're they're missing out, you know. I mean there's first of all, I mean, you can get access to there's so much there's so much new music being put out, but also right right in your own backyard, you know, there's musicians making music and you know you need to. I always use my father as a very positive example of this. My dad, you know, he's in his seventies, but he still loves hearing new music. He lives on the sea coast here in New Hampshire and there's a great college station at the University of New Hampshire called WUNH and my dad I'd love to listen to wun H because he loves hearing new music.

20:03 Speaker 2: He loves hearing you know, new artists that he's never been exposed to before, either young, new upcoming artists, or just artists who maybe are not young but have been around a while but he just had never heard them before.

20:15 Speaker 1: He loves hearing new stuff.

20:17 Speaker 2: And you know, and I can only imagine what the scene is like there and how much great music there must be there. But you know, I always encourage people, you know, take a look around. You know this this great, incredible music being created by musicians right in front of you. You know you're just not looking.

20:34 Speaker 5: You know what I mean, I know exactly what you're saying. Well, I hear it all the time. You know, people are like, well, I don't want to go see that band. I'm like, why No, I don't know who they are. I was like, okay, but did you know who Metallica was before you heard them for.

20:45 Speaker 3: The first time?

20:46 Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.

20:47 Speaker 3: Everybody has to be unknown before they're known.

20:49 Speaker 1: Exactly.

20:49 Speaker 5: Go and spend two hundred and fifty dollars on a ticket to see Metallica, whom you'll never meet, or you can go to a bar and here's some brand new music you've never heard and talk with them and do shots with them after the.

20:58 Speaker 1: Show, right exactly. And then if it was a.

21:02 Speaker 5: Fifteen dollars ticket instead of two hundred and fifty bucks, you know.

21:05 Speaker 2: Come on, yeah, yeah, and then if you know, if they get big, you can say, hey, I knew them when.

21:10 Speaker 5: Exactly I did shots with you know, come upcoming Metallica back in the day, you know.

21:15 Speaker 1: There you go, Yeah, I hear that a lot. You know.

21:17 Speaker 2: In this area where we are, people will say, you know, I saw Aerosmith, you know, back in the day when they were you know, just a bar band, you know, and it's it's that's usually an example people use from from in this part of the country. But yeah, there's there's so much, uh, there's so much great talent out there, and people people should definitely keep their eyes open for that. Do you use your now with your your online station and your show, do you use that to showcase indie artists or do you do you use that to promote Sure?

21:47 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm.

21:49 Speaker 5: Sure all the all the indie artists that are around here that have they have, you know, recorded music that's you know, you know, you know the level it has to be at.

21:56 Speaker 3: Yeah, you know the quality level it has to be at.

21:59 Speaker 5: You know, anybody that has those albums and stuff in it and they submit to me they've been on the radio station. I go through those albums too, and I pick a nice wide range of all the local music and put it in there. And then I sprinkle in some national stuff too, just for the people that can't handle not knowing what the next song is, right, you know, just to kind of keep them okay.

22:16 Speaker 2: I think there's value in doing that too, is sprinkling in some national artists, because I've I've always felt that that lends, uh for you know, for some people, that lends a certain credibility to the independent artists, maybe the local artists if they're mixed in with some national artists, you know what I mean.

22:34 Speaker 5: Just yeah, for sure, you can have an unknown person selling bar bells on TV, or you can have Arnold schwarzeneg, you're selling bar bells on TV.

22:41 Speaker 3: Which one's going to sell faster?

22:42 Speaker 1: Very well? Put exactly, put a couple of.

22:45 Speaker 5: Pearl jam songs on a couple of things in there around all these local artists.

22:48 Speaker 3: Yeah, it'll attract a little bit.

22:50 Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So the where where should people go? Like, where can they find the online station that you have?

23:00 Speaker 3: Well, it's at alien x radio dot com.

23:02 Speaker 5: Okay, And unfortunately I've realized within the last couple of days that the player isn't working, so I have to figure out how to fix that since it's been a decade since I've been into the actual controls of the website. Oh really, Yeah, there's no reason to change the website. We just changed the music and stuff, you know, and everything's live, you know, most of our shows and stuff, so we don't have to go in there and change much. Yeah, and I can't get back in there, so I got to figure that out.

23:26 Speaker 5: Yeah, that's at alienxradio dot com. And then I of course have a Facebook page. The artist page is just alien Stone. Yeah, and you can get me at Keith samlan at Alien at Facebook as well.

23:37 Speaker 2: Okay, and then the album. Can people find the album anyway? I mean I assume it's on all the streaming platforms and everything.

23:43 Speaker 5: Yeah, I went through that distro kid, so it's on everything. So you've got Spotify, Apple Music. You know, it's even on like Pandora and things like that, so you can find it pretty much everywhere.

23:54 Speaker 3: Outstanding by the way in the freak Star stuff.

23:56 Speaker 1: Oh good.

23:56 Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm curious. I'm curious to check that out too. Do you do physical copies of the album.

24:02 Speaker 1: Or is strictly online?

24:04 Speaker 4: No?

24:05 Speaker 5: I have physical copies too. I've made some CDs and also what I really like is they look like business cards, but they're actually a flash drive. It pops out the side, oh, perfectly straight in. Those are really nice too.

24:14 Speaker 2: We had someone on the show recently who used that same concept, and yeah, that's a great idea.

24:20 Speaker 5: Some people you hand them a CD and they go, what is this? Is this America online?

24:23 Speaker 3: What is this? They don't know?

24:26 Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting.

24:27 Speaker 2: That's a subject that comes up a lot on the show too. Because there was a point where, because I've been doing this a long time, and there was a point where it seemed like none of the guests we would have on nobody was doing physical media. I'm talking like maybe seven or eight years ago, and you know, and that's fine, you know, just you know, email me the tracks whatever. But lately, well I shouldn't say lately, I'd say probably for at least the past five years, it seems like, at least in this area, for the guests that we have coming in person from our area, physical media has had quite a resurgence.

24:59 Speaker 1: A lot of our guests bring in CDs.

25:01 Speaker 2: Now, you know, they send us the files ahead of time, obviously, but they'll also bring in a physical copy or even we've had some who even do vinyl and they'll bring in a vinyl record, not for us to play, but just to have. Although we do have a record player here that one of the other hosts uses, and we even have a CD player that I've never used, but we do have one here in the in the studio that I know one of our hosts sometimes will bring in CDs to play. But but it's interesting, you know, uh physical media never seems to completely go away, and sometimes it has these little resurgences, and uh so a lot of the artists around here are releasing things on CD and even on vinyl, which I understand is very expensive.

25:39 Speaker 2: But but I like your I like your concept with the flash drive.

25:43 Speaker 5: Yeah, it's it's you know, the physical media is kind of it's just kind of changed what its purpose really is. It's like, we know that when this guy gets home, he's probably going to listen to it on his smart device or whatever from a streaming service.

25:54 Speaker 1: Right.

25:55 Speaker 3: But you know, now the physical media I don't.

25:57 Speaker 5: Even like when I when I ad a show or something, I find people who were interested and I just give them one. Yeah, okay, it's it has become the physical media has become the promotional tool to get you to go and stream exactly.

26:10 Speaker 3: It's almost what it's become now. You know.

26:11 Speaker 5: So I'm not trying to sell I'm not, you know, out of the trunk of my car out there going I got yeah, I you know, I don't do that.

26:18 Speaker 3: You know.

26:19 Speaker 5: I just find someone who I think was interested and I give them a copy.

26:23 Speaker 1: Yeah.

26:23 Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's an excellent strategy. Well, Keith, I appreciate you joining us. In a moment, I'm gonna play this track. Criticize yourself because this is this is the other one that I like, I said, I enjoyed the whole album, but breathe and criticize yourself for the two that really really kind of struck me. I'm curious if there's anything we should know about this song, if there's a backstory to this one, or what this one might be about, because again, this is another one of those songs too where I'm listening to the lyrics and it's like, well there's something here, you know, and and and I'm.

26:54 Speaker 1: Really curious about it.

26:54 Speaker 2: And by the way, and also too, if you want to talk about the guitar player on this one, because this is also another song where I really love the guitar work on this.

27:01 Speaker 5: Yeah, the guitar this one is really involved. Yeah, it really is. Basically, he came over and he had nothing planned. This is Donnie Stanfill. He's the league. He's one of the guitar players from the band Creeping Chaos here in Detroit, and he probably recorded I just I just played the song and just let him go and improvise. He did probably fourteen tracks. Wow, just improvised. Yeah, and then I went through and cut and spliced and put together all my favorite pieces Okay, so that's what we ended up with.

27:30 Speaker 5: And then when I played it back for me, he goes, dude, I don't think I could play that.

27:35 Speaker 3: I was like, you just did? You just did.

27:39 Speaker 5: That's what we're telling everybody, right right, So that's where that came from. And the song itself is basically about just all the things that can kind of build up and start suffocating you. Is basically what it is, you know, the just the day to day grind, the things that happen around you and stuff. It's just it's choking you. It's it's suffocating you. And it's like, when will we get a chance to breathe? Yeah, give us a chance to take a breath. You know enough, it's enough, right right?

28:07 Speaker 2: Well again, congratulations on the album. I think it's really good. And uh, and remind people again to uh where should they go to keep up with everything that you're doing online?

28:17 Speaker 5: Well, it's alien Stone on Facebook or Keith Samlan on Facebook. And then you got alien x Radio of course, when that's all you know, moving and grooving again. Yeah, and anywhere on any streaming site anywhere you type in alien Stone or after the Gray and it should pop right up.

28:32 Speaker 3: Man, it's everywhere YouTube everything.

28:34 Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, excellent. Yeah.

28:35 Speaker 2: I suggest people check it out and alien Stone is one word, by the way too for people when you're looking for it. And yeah, fantastic. Keith, thank you so much for joining us this morning. We will we will definitely have to do this again. In fact, maybe we'll have you on again soon. I'd love to talk to you more about your your career with you mentioned you used to interview movie stars, and I'd love to talk to you about that in the future too, because you know, we we kind of mostly we talk about music on the show, but we do mix it some other things as well, so we'll have to figure that out and set up a time for that.

29:04 Speaker 2: But congratulations on the album. I think it's great. I suggest everyone check it out. I'm gonna hit this track in a moment, criticize yourself, another very very strong track from the album.

29:13 Speaker 1: But we'll let you go for now. But Keith, thank you so much.

29:16 Speaker 3: Thank you for having me on the show.

29:17 Speaker 1: All Right, you got to take care.

29:19 Speaker 3: I have a good one.

29:20 Speaker 1: Bye bye, all right. Wonderful.

29:21 Speaker 2: So that was Keith sam Land and the project is called alien Stone. The album is after the Gray and we're gonna give this a spin, and then we're going to come back and Jenny and I are going to talk to you for a couple of minutes about for those of you who are listening live on Saturday, some exciting things going on today that Jenny and I are going to be doing. That you can come join us and be a part of. But for right now, again, this is Alien Stone and the track is called Criticize Yourself.

29:45 Speaker 1: I really like this one a lot. Check it out.

30:54 Speaker 7: There's a Storemas's brewin.

30:59 Speaker 6: It's gone. Then the real slow from glass houses, your programs a question all I know by then out. By then I ride out.

31:33 Speaker 7: There's a fire that's building your entry and the flames

31:42 Speaker 7: and now the fire is raging.

31:47 Speaker 6: And killing and the names. By then I ride out.

32:05 Speaker 6: By now I had out.

32:10 Speaker 4: Well your story in this by life with your neighs and Saty getting here for your big moment, by face uh Bran's you sell him a wheel.

32:23 Speaker 6: Till you print sash yourself.

32:28 Speaker 4: Don't you print sash yourself? Why can't you print sash yourself?

32:40 Speaker 6: There's a war.

32:41 Speaker 7: Wheel flight is.

32:45 Speaker 6: It's not a battle with it.

32:49 Speaker 7: You're judgment strikes light light me.

32:54 Speaker 6: Is this a warking within by me? Not hide up

33:12 Speaker 6: by men? Add an, will you go in this sideline?

33:20 Speaker 4: W dornaser safty get on? You gonna jumping on in my BASI bet not? Your sails can get the wheel

33:30 Speaker 4: till you priti sis your sell? Don't you pretty stash your sall? Why can't you pretty sis you sell? Will you st don my life with your neighs? And sat to kill you for your bingle in my faser? But I just sail be never within till you pretty side to sell?

34:33 Speaker 5: Well, don't you.

34:33 Speaker 6: Bread out to sell?

34:37 Speaker 3: Why can't you fret side you say?

35:05 Speaker 2: I love the guitar sound on that. I love that guitar tone that is alien Stone. The song is called Criticize Yourself. Alien Stone, of course is Keith sam Land. And thank you again to Keith for joining us. Check out alien Stone, check out alien x Radio and I'm going to be checking that out looking forward to learning more about that. We'll probably have Keith on again because like I said, I'd love to talk to him too. I'd love to have a supplemental conversation with him about his radio career. And you know he mentioned Houston interview movie stars and some of the other things he does on his show.

35:38 Speaker 2: Very very interesting guy.