Last year, Stephen Sanchez spent a few minutes writing a song for his girlfriend. Now, that song -- the retro-sounding "Until I Found You" -- is a huge hit that just went Gold. In a conversation with ABC Audio, Stephen laughed, "I don't even understand it at all!"
The 19-year-old wrote the romantic tune for Georgia, his then-girlfriend, after being inspired by vocal groups of the '40s and '50s like The Platters, The Ink Spots and The Mills Brothers. While he and Georgia are no longer together, Stephen said, "We're friends now and we're great, and she's amazing and she'll always be someone so important and special to me."
"I wrote the song last May in like 10 minutes, and then I worked out a voice memo and I sent it over to her," he recalled. "She loved it ... and that's all the song ever needed to be, was just a song about a girl that I love, y'know?"
He laughed, "And now it's somehow this ginormous, grand thing! But she loved it, and that's all that mattered to me."
"I mean, the song just got officially certified Gold today," Stephen told ABC Audio Thursday. "I can't even believe I just said that sentence...! Honestly, I didn't think I would get this far."
"It's even more wild that The Platters ... were on the [record] label Mercury back in the '50s. And this record is signed through Mercury, and it's Gold under Mercury. And it's a 1950s-style love song," he marveled. "Like, that's just unreal and such a full circle thing. I don't even understand it at all!"
"Until I Found You" is included on Stephen's new EP, Easy On My Eyes, which is out Thursday. He starts a tour with Noah Kahan October 12.