Genevieve Stokes Talks Reconnecting With Herself For Her Debut Album ‘With A Lightning Strike’

Genevieve Stokes is like no other storyteller we’ve seen right now. She knows how to concoct visceral images by stitching together the right melodies to their counterpart emotions. Despite the internal turmoil she’s gone through, her new record is an outpouring of consolation, kindness, and healing.

We sat down with Stokes ahead of the release of her debut album With a Lightning Strike to chat about the charm of her childhood home, out-of-body experiences, Charli’s cutting words in brat, and realizing making music is meant to be fun.

At the core, you’re a skillful storyteller who is incredibly intentional about how you want to express the message you’re trying to get across. Every lyric heavily leans on illustrating an image in the listener's mind, and all of your visualizers are whimsical and powerful. Could you talk about the meaning behind the album title, and the significance of the lighthouse on the cover?

Yeah, thank you! So, I love Tarot. I've gotten really into it in the past few years, and I've referenced it a lot in other EPs and stuff. But my favorite card is the tower, and I remember I wrote the song “With A Lightning Strike,” and that lyric just really stuck with me. I was like, ‘Oh, that ties into the theme of tarot!’

In the past few years, I feel like I've gone through some intense things that have altered my perspective and the things that I write about. It just felt very fitting for the title to be With a Lightning Strike, and for it to be centered around the tower card. Did I explain what the tower card even is?

A little! If you could dive into that too. 

It’s about upheaval and destruction. It’s usually depicted by a lightning strike hitting a tower, and the tower falling apart. And the card after the tower is the star. I like the combination of those cards because it shows that once you get rid of an old foundation, you can kind of start over and find something that's more real and more sturdy. But since I live in Maine, I thought that it’d be interesting if I depicted the tower as a lighthouse.

Like we were talking about before this call, it’s cool to listen to a project and know exactly where the artist is from because of how palpable their roots are in their sound. I know you’re from Maine, and that your childhood home plays an integral part in who you are as a musician. Was there a special spot that you’d go to during your process that ignited inspiration for you the most, or helped you reconnect with yourself before a session?

Yeah! There's a stream in my backyard that I would go to a lot as a kid, and I wrote about it a lot on the album. Some of these were written when I lived in New Orleans and New York, and to feel more grounded while writing I would just picture the stream in my backyard. It naturally kind of turned into this motif throughout the album. 

Although the stream is extremely polluted and kind of scraggly looking because we live next to a really busy street, it's just a very peaceful place for me and holds so many memories. That’s something that I tend to write about a lot.

BTS shot by Robin Glass for "God." Photo via Genevieve Stokes. 

I know a lot of the album videos that you shot were in your backyard. Could you talk to me about filming the visualizer for “God?”

That actually was just an iPhone video that my friend Abbie took while we were taking photos down there, and it was so beautiful. All of these fireflies were everywhere in my backyard, and it had such a magical feeling. We were trying to capture it in all these different ways– we had like a high-quality camera– and for some reason, it felt like the low-quality video on a phone just felt magical. Like there was this mystery to it.

I’ve spent the past year at home and have been really appreciating my backyard recently. Throughout this whole year, every season– it's a completely different place. It completely transforms the flowers. It's so magical to see nature unfold like that, and to be really present with it. I've lived here my whole life, but I think I went through an angsty period where I really didn't care about nature or going outside– I just spent most of my time indoors. 

I think in general Maine is really beautiful, but my backyard for some reason– I think because I grew up creating fantasy worlds with my siblings and stuff– there's just a specific whimsy to it that I love.

“Desert Eagle” opens up the whole project, and it holds a lot of movement in the tempo and vocal work too. The gritty guitar that creeps in the background is my favorite part.  Can you talk about the writing process for that one, and what led to the decision that it should kickstart the record?

I remember I was listening to a lot of Fiona Apple at the time– I think I wrote that around a year and a half ago. I have this piano in my garage that is in really poor shape, and I remember there was just a storm, and so the majority of the keys get really sticky after a storm because it's an uninsulated garage. I found this little patch of keys that were still working, and I wrote “Desert Eagle” on it. I just love having restrictions when making something. So that was fun to find, you know. To create something out of such a small amount of keys.

I think that song– I didn’t go in with a plan. I wasn't thinking about anything in particular, but the “Desert Eagle” part– I just kept repeating that and then creating this song around the idea of a person being this predator in the sky looking for victims. It was fun to write. 

I was gonna start the album with the song “With a Lightning Strike,” but then it felt too obvious because the last song is called “How Things End.” I was like, ‘I don't like it to be so sandwiched,’ so I was trying to find a song that was a surprising start. I like how energized [Desert Eagle] is, and it's kind of like, “Whoa!” because it's so chaotic. And the whole song– I wanted it to feel like I'm unraveling and panicking, and just angry, but in a way that's kind of fun. I thought it would be a fun way to start the album because it’s so unexpected.

Earlier, you talked about fantasy worlds that you made with your siblings when you were younger. I feel like each of your projects feels like a distinct world, but also carries the consistency of your sound. As an artist, do you usually start a body of work from a blank slate? Or do you have a few ideas of what it’s going to feel like, and then funnel your ideas through that? 

That’s a good question. I feel like I'll write one song, and then that sets the tone for the rest of the songs. I go through phases where I listen to a lot of music, and then phases where I'm listening to nothing. And I think I like to absorb as much as I can, sit with that and think about those inspirations, and then create my own filter of all the things I'm inspired by.

But with With a Lightning Strike, it was inspired by that initial song. I feel like there is this visual image that starts to creep in with everything, and as I keep writing I'm like, ‘Oh, I can see it more clearly.’ With this, I felt like every song that I wrote, like if I wrote something eerie or dark, the image would become clearer and clearer. And so the visuals kind of just went along with the creation.

Do you feel like your creative approach to the record differed from projects like Catching Rabbits and Swimming Lessons?

Yes, definitely. This was such a different process. I wrote a lot of the songs over the past two years, and then I recorded demos with my friends, Fiona and Pete. Fiona plays drums, and Pete plays synth and guitar, and it was such a natural process. With Catching Rabbits, I went directly to the studio to work with Tony in LA. I remember I had to perform my songs for a group of really incredible musicians that were going to write parts, and it was really intimidating. I think I kind of lost myself in that process, to be honest, because I just started feeling like such an imposter. 

And then with this album, I just let go of all of that pressure and that idea that I needed to be something special, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is just fun!’ I've been making music since I was a little kid, and it's always been fun. To create something that I'm really proud of, I have to let go of expectations. And so the making of this album was like– we would rent Airbnbs, or they would come to my house and we would just mess around. And then at the end, we went to Tony and we finished everything with him at the studio. It was great. I think this is how I'm going to continue to do things.

I feel like your songwriting is super organic and fluid– almost like writing in a diary. The end of “Life of a Woman” with your isolated vocals gave me chills, and is one of my favorites. “Mean Guy” also feels very intimate and very personal in its prose. Do you ever feel hindrances in fully expressing what you want to say? Or do you find it easy to be vulnerable in your lyrics?

I have been self-conscious about that in the past, and I think I've tried to cover it with more artistic language. But I feel like good music is when it's so authentic and you feel like the person fully believes what they're saying. And so I realized the more I just said how I felt– and sometimes it can be as plain as saying ‘I'm sad’ or ‘You hurt me’– that's more effective than trying to create flowery language around it. I think as long as it feels really authentic and I'm not trying to do something, I don't feel embarrassed about it, because I'm like, ‘That's just how I feel.’ 

“Mean Guy” I wrote really recently, actually– we added it to the album last minute. I was listening to Charli XCX a lot, and was admiring how upfront her lyrics are. This was literally right when brat came out, and I remember I was listening to “I think about it all the time.” There's just this honesty in her writing and this sweetness that comes through because she's so straightforward, and she'll just say things as they are. I was like, ‘Damn that like, really affects me!’ I love it when people just say how they feel, and it doesn't have to be hidden behind all these, you know, convoluted things. 

Besides Charli, was there any artist that you gravitated towards, or album that you had on repeat while you were making everything? If so, are there influences that can be found in this project? 

I listened to God Save the Animals constantly by Alex G– I just love Alex G in general. I think he's a perfect example of the emotion of the chords being the first thing, and then everything else works around those chords and creates such an intense feeling. And so I was listening to that a lot. I was listening to Mitski and Fiona Apple. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is one of my favorite albums of all time– I will just listen to the whole thing like it's one story. 

Also, I was listening to a lot of music that doesn’t sound anything like me, or wasn't meant to inspire me, but was just really fun to listen to. I don’t know, I love Baby Keem– I listen to Baby Keem a lot. And, who else? Like, Coco & Clair Clair. Insane. I love them.

Your lyrics throughout the album span across different seasons of your life, whether that's super recent, like you were talking about with “Mean Guy”, or maybe ones that you've had lyrics about in your back pocket for a while. Looking back at the overall writing process of putting this album together, what is the most authentic place you can remember writing and recording these songs from?

A lot of the songs were about my relationship with myself and my connection to reality in general. When I was living in New York and New Orleans, I was going through the hardest time I've ever gone through where I would just be panicking all the time. I went through a really bad acid trip, and had literal out-of-body experiences and paranoia for like six months after that.

I feel like I was just trying to understand my relationship to myself, and why I felt all of this pain that I hadn't really processed. And also dealing with actual paranoia and not [being] sure about what was real and what was fake– I just was panicking constantly. And so I wrote a lot of these songs to understand what was going on internally, and to feel less alone because I felt so isolated within myself and like– I didn't trust anything. 

Is there a song on the album that you were writing and you felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, it is really good to get this off my chest,’ or one that you resonate with the most?

Yes, I think “Amusing” captured that feeling really well because it was about the process of going through paranoia and out-of-body experiences. At first, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is interesting. What's happening?’ and not taking it too seriously, and then suddenly it's like having a panic attack, but outside of your body. Throughout the song, I'm realizing that I'm in distress and I’m sad, and reconnecting to myself throughout that and being like ‘Oh! There's this whole well of emotion that I haven't been tapping into because I've been drifting outside of myself.’

The ending feels like I'm fully in outer space, but then it also devolves into something completely new, and I come to accept that feeling at the end. That one I feel the most connected to, I think.

Was there a song that was challenging for you as an artist? Like when putting together the instrumentation or layering the harmonies, is there one that really stretched you as an artist that hasn't happened with other projects?

I think the same song “Amusing” because it was so personal, and I was trying to convey this really specific emotion. It took a really long time, and just a lot of technical difficulties and stuff with that one. But I think it's a nice feeling– even though it was stressful to have to go through so many different versions– I just cared about the song so much that I wanted it to be perfect.

I think in the past, I've had songs where I literally just wanted to give up because I'm like, ‘I don't even care about this song that much. Let's just move on.’ But I think with this project, the songs that I was struggling with production was because I cared, and I was so invested in them that I wanted them to be perfect. So yeah, it was a different kind of struggle.

Your tour for the album starts very soon. Was there a song while you were making the album that you were visualizing specifically for a live space, or are excited to perform?

I think “Life of a Woman” because I can just imagine that feeling really therapeutic to sing live. I don't know what kind of song that would be considered, but it has a little rock moment at the end. That one I thought about a lot.

Is there one thing you want your listeners to take away from this album? 

I think I want people that are going through a similar feeling of isolation, and people that feel very alone and freaked out by their own existence– I hope that they find comfort in this. When I was going through that, I was listening to so much Frank Ocean and Mac Miller, and these artists that really grounded me in reality and made me feel like everything was going to be okay. I hope I can create that sense of stability or calm for people that are struggling.