Most people hear “Until I Found You” as a love song. It is not. It is a song about the months before love, when Stephen Sanchez had already met the woman he would write about and chose to walk away from her. The reunion is in the final chorus. The rest of the song lives in what preceded it, in the choosing to leave, in the loss that was entirely his own doing.
That is the thing worth understanding about these lyrics, and it changes what the production is doing, and why some listeners find the song closer to grief than romance.
The Near Miss
In August 2020, Sanchez was dating a girl from Massachusetts named Georgia. He ended it. Not because he didn’t care, but because he did.
He told Genius that personal circumstances at the time scared him badly enough that he didn’t want her pulled into them. She was loving and consistent towards him. He pushed her away to protect her.
He moved to Nashville. They reconnected. He took her out on a date and, in May 2021, six months after arriving in the city, he wrote the song while the relationship was going well. Not as celebration, but as a reckoning with what the time without her had actually felt like.
“In the middle of our relationship I wrote the song,” he said, “nodding back at that time when I lost her. I felt like I was lost too during that time.”
Every lyric lands differently once you know this. “I’ll never let you go again like I did” is not a romantic vow. It is an admission, spoken by someone who knows precisely what letting go felt like because they chose it once and spent months regretting it. The chorus, “I would never fall in love again until I found her / I said I would never fall unless it’s you I fall into,” is not a man declaring his love. It is a man describing the blank, directionless interval that preceded it.
The song is named for finding her. But it was written from inside the fear of losing her again.
How the Sound Holds the Loss
Sanchez grew up in Northern California. His grandfather has a property on a hill in San Jose, two barns on either side of a house that overlooks the whole city.
Every morning as a child, breakfast, then out to dig through vinyl. His grandfather was 85 at the time of the Billboard interview, which means the only records in those barns were from the 1950s and 60s. Paul Anka. The Duprees. The Platters.
When he got to Nashville and started writing, he went to Carter Vintage Guitars and bought an old Rickenbacker and an old amp. The reverb-heavy, close-miked production, the slightly tinny, retreating quality that runs through the whole track, came from chasing the sound of those records. He was playing around with 50s covers when the first line came to him, and that was it.
The song sounds like it is coming from somewhere else, through a radio two rooms over or across a distance you cannot measure. When Sanchez sings about the period before Georgia came back, the production does not give you warmth. It gives you space. The echo on the vocals does not sound like presence. It sounds like someone calling out and waiting.
The reverb was the one thing he kept arguing about during the recording session. “There are small, petty things that I always get caught up on within every song we’ve ever released,” he told Billboard. The reverb stayed. Without it, the song would register as arrival. With it, the song never fully leaves the place it came from.
This carries through to the vocal performance. On “love her” and “found her,” Sanchez slides upward into the note rather than landing on it cleanly, a swing-era technique that keeps the melody from settling. His vibrato is quick and light, present but not intrusive, the opposite of the modern power-ballad approach where vibrato signals effort. And the “I found youuuuu” at the close of the chorus hangs longer than it needs to, trails off into the reverb, leaves the listener somewhere between arrival and departure. He absorbed these techniques from those barns in San Jose before he understood what they were. The result is a vocal performance that sounds found, not constructed.
The Platters, one of the direct inspirations for the track, were a Mercury Records act in the 1950s. Sanchez is on Mercury now, part of Republic. “Until I Found You” was Mercury’s first release under him. A 1950s love song, cut in the spirit of Mercury’s original artists, released as the label’s opening statement. Sanchez noticed this when the song was approaching gold status. He called it “kind of dope.” It closes a loop across seventy years.
Why Some Listeners Hear Grief Instead of Romance
A Reddit thread in r/Music collected responses from listeners who found the song deeply unsettling: a sinking feeling on hearing the intro, something close to existential dread from the instrumentation, an atmosphere that did not read as romantic at all. One commenter compared it to the music you hear in a horror film when characters walk into a haunted location, a ghost stuck playing music from their era on a loop. Another said it made them walk slower. A mother asked for it to be turned off without being able to explain why.
The production keeps the grief in the room alongside the reunion. There is no musical moment where the remove fully closes. The reverb stays heavy throughout. The vocals never quite land. The person singing has found the woman he pushed away, and he is grateful, but the song was written by someone who still knows exactly what it cost to be without her.
Grief and relief do not always cancel each other out. This song does not let them.
The Gap Finds Its Audience
The solo version came out in September 2021. It did not chart immediately. Six months later it debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 100, then kept climbing over 23 weeks, reaching No. 38. The Em Beihold duet version dropped in April 2022, giving the song a second wave that took it to No. 12 on the Hot 100, No. 1 on Hot Country Songs, and No. 3 on Hot Rock and Alternative Songs. Beihold recorded her verse remotely, rewriting some of Sanchez’s lines to fit her own experience of meeting someone during the pandemic. Her cooler texture against his gives the final chorus a different weight: two people accounting for the same feeling from different starting points.
On TikTok, the song crossed a billion views. People used it to narrate their own near misses, their own versions of the August 2020 moment when someone they loved was still within reach. The song worked as a container for that feeling because it carries the ambivalence built into it, not despite it.
The song ends with the reunion. But the production never stops sounding like the place before it. It is what the song is made of, and it is why “Until I Found You” still sounds unresolved no matter how many times you hear it. The reverb does not clear. The note does not land. Sanchez found her, but the song stays inside the fear that he almost didn’t.
Song: “Until I Found You” / Stephen Sanchez feat. Em Beihold Original release: September 2021 (solo) / April 22, 2022 (duet) Written: May 2021, Nashville / Rickenbacker purchased from Carter Vintage Guitars Written by: Stephen Sanchez and Georgia Webster Produced by: Stephen Sanchez, Konrad Snyder, Ian Fitchuk Label: Mercury / Republic Records Chart peak: No. 12 Hot 100 / No. 1 Hot Country Songs / No. 3 Hot Rock and Alternative Songs EP: Evangeline (May 14, 2022)
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