Stephen Sanchez had long been worried about moving to New York, but now that he’s here he can’t recall why.
“I had strong feelings about not moving to New York for a long time, that I wouldn’t like it. It’s a lot. It’s just a lot,” he says. “And then now I’m here, I’m so in love with it.”
The Sacramento, Calif., native, who spent the last few years living in Nashville, is only three weeks into his tenure as a New York resident, but already he’s been soaking in the inspiration.
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The relocation makes perfect sense for Sanchez as he moves on up into the big leagues: Sanchez’s major label debut record “Angel Face” is out Friday from Mercury Records/Republic Records, after a crazy two-year journey followed by the success of his 2021 single “Until I Found You.” The song has taken him to Glastonbury, where Sir Elton John brought him onstage to perform the hit during his set; and the South of France where he serenaded Sofia Richie as she walked down the aisle earlier this year. Now, he’s released a full-length album of ’50s- and ’60s-style songs that follow a storyline about a fictional Stephen Sanchez called Troubadour Sanchez as he experiences love, heartbreak and everything in between.
“I’m just excited to see which song people are going to run toward the most,” Sanchez says. “I’m so in love with this whole project and this story and these characters that have been written for it, and I feel excited to let people in on that and have it out so they can be a part of the story.”
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The 20-year-old was introduced to that era of music by his grandparents, who he would visit on their farm in San Jose. As a kid, he loved to rummage through their record collection and pull out the likes of Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, Dean Martin, The Platters and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, he says.
“There are flavors of those sounds in all of these songs that are on this new record,” Sanchez says. “Even in the character traits and the style, my grandparents are to blame for that. They just sent me home with vinyl, and the first time I ever heard those records was on the hard copy.”
He didn’t set out to write a record that followed a storyline of made up characters, but once “Until I Found You” took off, he started to daydream about creating a whole world of characters. Troubadour’s love interest is named Evangeline, which is also the title of one of the album’s tracks, and Sanchez wanted to write about a big, grand love story.
“The Troubadour’s romance was going to be strictly like, ‘Oh, they run off into the sunset.’ And I was like, ‘No, this should be devastating, just as all love is eventually in some way,’” he says.
It wasn’t until Sanchez was in high school and had his first experiences with love that he got serious about writing songs.
“I was developing crushes early on and liking girls and girls liking me back, or even just experiencing your identity for the first time and understanding what that looks like and how to express yourself in a way that is healthy and clear. And I think music was just the best way for me to do that at the time,” he says. “It was all self-dialogue, talking to myself, helping me understand the world.”
As he’s come to understand the world, he’s been struck by how many of the themes he found in the music his grandparents introduced him to resonated today.
“There’s so much [music now] about just strictly even falling in love and being like, ‘Oh, everything is roses and daisies running through a field hand in hand.’ But this record is all parts of the humanity of love: love is this beautiful, soft, gentle entrance into someone’s life, and then it is seductive and alluring, and then it’s mysterious and unknown and devastating, and it’s longing and it’s begging in a way,” he says. “Those were the themes of all those songs back in the day as well. And so when it came to writing this record, it felt very natural to be like, ‘OK, these sounds exist. They’re ’50s and ’60s style, this songwriting should feel that way.’”