Midway through his history-making set at Glastonbury, a farewell show peppered with surprise guests such as Rina Sawayama and The Killers’ Brandon Flowers, Elton John paused the gig to introduce a floppy-haired 20-year-old. Unlike other talent there to sing the Rocket Man’s classics, this special guest was here to perform one of his own, and felt like a total unknown in comparison to the lofty rumours swirling around Britney Spears ahead of the slot.
Stephen Sanchez has come a long way since he dropped out of high school and got signed to the major label Republic Records aged 17, after sharing a snippet of his song Lady By The Sea for his growing TikTok following. A swooning, paired-back love song, its old-timey sensibilities paved the way for the glossier vintage stylings of Sanchez’s big, breakthrough moment Until I Found You. The song – which Sanchez ended up performing alongside John on the Pyramid – has gone platinum, twice over, in the US. Now, the artist is turning his attention to his full length debut album Angel Face. Out in September, the concept-heavy record will explore a fictional Sixties love triangle.
Sanchez’s family hails from Sacramento, a hipster paradise in California, but you get the sense he’s right at home where he’s based now in Tennessee – the land of Elvis, steeped in musical history, where nostalgia is the currency in vogue. His family isn’t musical: his dad is a kitchen designer and his mum works as a paralegal. His sister works on a farm, one brother sells medical equipment, and another is in the military. Instead, Sanchez’s musical education came from flicking through his grandparents’ old vinyl records from the Fifties and Sixties.
“Elvis taught me how to move, Roy [Orbison] taught me how to sing, and The Platters taught me how to write about love,” Sanchez says, when we speak at the Standard Hotel in King’s Cross, in a lobby appropriately stuffed to the gills with Futurist furniture.
Sir Elton has previously referred to Sanchez’s songs as “nods to the past” – and his homage to the sound of an era bygone seems to have struck a chord with legions of young fans nostalgic for the analogue, rock n’ roll years of their grandparents. “I romanticised all of its visually stunning colours and sleekness,” Sanchez told Rolling Stone of the era in which he mines his inspiration. “The glamorous cars, movie theatres, mom & pop shops.” Everything but the Vietnam War, it seems.
His songs are honey-soaked odes to a vintage era, with the footnotes to match. A recent track like Evangeline, which is about surrendering yourself to a lover, seems to reference the central figure from Bob Dylan’s 1965 folk protest song Ballad of a Thin Man: “Do you need The Sandman?” he asks, “Or a phone call to Mr Jones?” His view of romance is similarly lifted from the Fifties as well. Women in his songs are treated with careful respect that sometimes feels a tad homely and chaste. Still, of all the artists out there wearing rose-tinted glasses, Sanchez is one of most listened-to: he’s one of the top 160 most popular artists on Spotify globally.
Just what is it about this particular imitator that’s captured so many hearts? “I couldn’t believe that someone of only 19 or 20 years of age could write or sing a song like this,” John said of Sanchez – and Until I Found You – at Worthy Farm. “A message to future generations,” one person commented on the song’s music video last year. "Don’t let this song die."
Sanchez’s music cuts through the noise. He draws in parents reminiscing about their childhood, youngsters imagining what it must have been like in ‘the good old days’, and of course the many listeners fawning over his boyish charms and coiffed quiff. He’s now released two EPs, 2021’s What Was, Not Now, and 2022’s Easy On My Eyes, while his debut Angel Face is out in September. Sanchez’s latest single Be More, a velvet-coated crooner about the uncertainity of falling hard into love, offers the first taste of things to come.
Though he’s just 20 years-old, Sanchez is undeniably mature for his age. He’s not cynical, however, and his wide-eyed optimism one of the best things about him. On the main stage at Glastonbury, he sang with the same anthemic zeal as John did some of his biggest hits. “I can’t believe anyone knew the song and I can’t believe they sang it back to me,” Sanchez says today. “It felt infinitely loud, my ears could have quite literally exploded.”
The crowd swayed and sang along as the sun set. “I felt infinite,” Sanchez says. “I could’ve split the sky in half I was so fearless.” John is known for championing young talent, and has been a vocal supporter of acts like Gabriels (the lead singer of which, Jacob Lusk, also appeared alongside John at Glastonbury), Rina Sawayama, and Berwyn in recent years.
“It’s the most incredible thing that’s ever happened to me,” Sanchez says of his friendship with John. He also got to practise at Wembley in the runup to the festival –a proper, pinch-yourself moment. “The fact that I’m even able to say that sentence feels, like, out of body,” he laughs.
Sanchez is also an old soul, but has none of the swagger or raw sex appeal of a young Mick Jagger (or indeed Elvis). He’s gentle and well-mannered, his accent more a lilt than a twang, and at first glance he feels about the furthest thing away from a rockstar.
“This record’s the counterculture, man,” he says of his debut. “It’s rock n roll!” How so? Because, he says, “it’s not full of sex … [or] disgusting lyricism. It’s about love and it’s deep and it’s true.” His nostalgia for the Sixties evidently stops short of any for the sexual revolution.
With Angel Face, he claims: “I finally feel like I’m releasing me. It’s not Elvis, it’s not Roy Orbison, it’s not The Platters. It’s Stephen Sanchez.” The album is beautiful, but it’s his voice, more than any artistic identity, that jumps out. He could have sung back-to-back covers, and it would have made little difference.
Sanchez seems to have equated modernity with trash, and tradition with value. He says his dream collaborator is Lana Del Rey, her obsession with mid-century Americana representing an overlapping fascination. He dreams of making an entire album with her. “She’s so talented and her voice is something of a past time,” he says. “Like a ghost is living in her throat and singing from beyond the grave.” He hopes it would be like a “Nancy and Frank Sinatra record”.
He also clearly prides himself on standing out from among other contemporary TikTok starlets, who he claims, startlingly forcefully, are producing “absolute garbage”. “All those quick releases, man,” he says. “Artists hopping on [TikTok] and writing a good chorus but then the rest of the track is terrible, and you’ve got people saying it’s the greatest song ever?” Still, some might say it’s snobby – unwise, even – to denigrate a platform that’s largely responsible for his successes.
Alongside calling back to vintage aesthetics and sonics, Sanchez’s faith has an equally strong influences on his work. “Faith is a big thing to me,” he says. Sanchez first fell in love with music in his local church, beginning a journey which led him towards gospel and soul.
Being a believer helped him through depression, he says, and helped him to stay resiliant through a challenging couple of years, coming of age during the pandemic while working through a breakup with the girl who inspired his biggest hit. Writing Until I Found You was cathartic at first (on it, Sanchez sings about a breakup he regrets), but became a poisoned chalice when he was reminded of heartbreak whenever he sang the song.
Then, a deeper blow came when Sanchez lost his voice, after developing a cyst on his chords that required surgery. “I felt I was going through two breakups at once,” he tells me. Faith, however, helped him to heal. And surgery, of course.
Rather than railing against the injustice of his situation, Sanchez says, he took stock of how lucky he was to have got as far as he had. “I think it’s okay to just be Stephen Sanchez for an hour, and to have that taken away from me,” he says. “The universe will decide when it’s my time.”
In Nashville, Sanchez sits at a cultural crossroads, among the liberal, blue voters of Music City in a state that’s otherwise a sea of red. We meet as Trump’s legal woes are mounting, alongside a resurgence of support for him within the Republican party.
The 2024 Presidential election will be the first in which Sanchez can vote. He’s candid about his doubts. When I ask him who he’ll vote for, he admits: “I have no idea. I’m not particularly invested in politics, because, Jeez, what a mess it is!”
I applaud whoever’s responsible for Sanchez’s media training. He nimbly dodges any questions about his political allegiances. “I kind of keep my views to myself because I feel like they only matter to me,” he says. “If I open up that conversation to others it becomes less about what I believe and more about what they believe about what I believe,” Sanchez adds.
Instead, Sanchez’s hope for the future is rather more idealistic: “We need more empathy, love and acceptance,” he says. Let’s keep our hopes alive: perhaps the Sixties mantra is alive and well after all?
