Sam Stokes On the Making Of “Lay on Grass”
Punk Head: This song was inspired by a five-year-old reminding you how to live. Why do you think adulthood makes us forget something so basic so quickly?
Sam Stokes: As we get older and take on more responsibilities, I think it's easy for us to believe that our "lives" are more focused on meetings and bills and paperwork - but ideally, those things should be simple and easy to take care of, so we're able to really LIVE. To be alive feels like running in the sand and laying on grass and jumping into cold lakes. My hope is to inspire a little bit of that free inner-child in anyone listening to this song.
Punk Head: Your music often feels playful without being naive. How do you protect innocence without pretending the world isn’t brutal?
Sam Stokes: Beautiful question and so important. My experience has shown me that we cannot ignore the pain within our own hearts and the pain in the world - but that pain is not the final destination. We move through it. We feel what we need to feel and ideally we return to love and joy. It's the most essential act of rebellion.
Punk Head: The idea of posture keeps surfacing—how we sit, how we live, how we shrink. Do you think modern life is literally bending us out of shape?
Sam Stokes: I see so many people waking up to the societal constructs placed upon us. When I think of the movies I watched as a kid and what "success" looked like, I see people lost in a rat race - fully consumed by money and their careers. Now so many people seem to be awakening to what truly matters - time. It's the one resource we can't control. It's so dearly precious and with that I think there's a new paradigm evolving.
For example, the old paradigm of the nuclear family (2 parents, 2 kids, 1 golden retriever) feels impossible by today's standards. Paying for a mortgage, childcare, groceries, etc. It's so much pressure on 2 people to provide all of these things and be able to enjoy life fully. I see more and more people shifting to multi-generational and communal living. Sharing land, resources, food, time and space together to relieve some of that burden and allow more space for time.
To me, that's the post-modern way of life. Where technology becomes a tool, but something we don't use for more than 2-3 hours a day. The rest of the time, we are cooking together, growing food together, building together and remembering how to move our bodies in natural and fortifying ways.
Punk Head: With modern life training us to document experiences instead of inhabiting them, do you think memory itself has changed because of that?
Sam Stokes: Absolutely! I make a very conscious effort to spend my quality time with loved ones in full awareness. You'll notice that most of what I share online are videos of shows or content that I create in specific "content creation sessions." When I'm with loved ones, I don't want to have an experience with them in the world. I want to be fully immersed in life with them. Even when I take myself on an adventure day all alone, I prefer to not document most of it and to be fully lost in the feeling of it.
So yes, a phone may document a photo or video of a memory, but for me a feeling of a memory is much more powerful and lasting. If you've ever lost someone, you'll find that you might forget the edges of their face, but you'll absolutely remember how they made you feel.
That's how I like to feel alive.
Punk Head: You’ve built this album through collaboration across geography. How does that contrast shape the sound?
Sam Stokes: My philosophy this past year in making this album has been quite a new experiment that I have found to be tremendously rewarding. I used to have a specific idea of how I wanted each instrument to play or what the overall production should sound like. This past year, I challenged myself to go into each session without a plan.
I had the songs written, but purposefully only work from guitar and vocals because I find that if I can create space for a musician to find themselves in a song, it is the best result anyway. So every performance, every musician that approaches a song, it's different every time. That means the songs have lives of their own.
So the sound, the version of the song that was meant to come to life that day - it is left to the cooks in the kitchen of that session. It's not a forced process with an end goal in mind, instead we discover it together.
“Lay on Grass” is coming out on February 2, 2026.
