A Night of Reclamation Stephen Sanchez & Lily Meola | Kemba Live!, Columbus, OH | October 14, 2023
Some shows are about spectacle. This one was about reclamation.
Both artists on the bill at Kemba Live! arrived on stage carrying something they'd had to fight to get back — one a career derailed by grief, the other a sound pulled from a half-century ago — and the evening shaped itself around that quiet act of recovery.
Lily Meola opened. Her story is the kind that gets softened in the retelling, so it's worth stating plainly: she had a record deal, she lost her mother to cancer while serving as her primary caregiver, and the deal dissolved in the aftermath. She resurfaced on America's Got Talent, not as a contestant chasing a lifeline, but as a performer reminding herself what she was capable of. The voice she brought to Kemba Live! is rooted in old-soul tradition — warm, precise, and stylized in a way that feels chosen rather than affected.
Her set leaned into heartache without wallowing. Six songs in, she paused and told the crowd, "Jokes on you — I'm actually the one with the commitment issues." It landed, and it was the right move; she'd earned the self-deprecation. She polled her Instagram followers mid-set for a cover request and they delivered Dolly Parton's "Jolene," which she handled with enough confidence to make you forget it's one of the most treacherous songs to attempt in front of a live audience. Two more covers followed, alongside an unfinished original she offered anyway — a choice that said more about her comfort on stage than any polished moment did. Backed by only a keyboardist and bassist, there was nowhere to hide, and she didn't need to hide.
She is still rebuilding, and the scaffolding shows in places. But the foundation is real.
Stephen Sanchez took the stage in an all-black vintage suit, framed by stage bulbs and a glowing backdrop that read Sanchez Baby! — a setup that would have felt like theater if the music didn't back it up. It did. Sanchez is twenty years old and already performing with the kind of conviction that usually takes a decade to develop. His sound sits at the intersection of 1950s rockabilly softness and contemporary pop instinct; less the raw edge of early rock and roll, more the velvet lull of its ballads. Harry Styles is the easy comparison on the pop side, and it's not wrong, but Sanchez wears the retro influence more literally — the suit, the staging, the unhurried delivery all point backward by design.
He found his audience on TikTok, posting a Cage the Elephant cover in 2020 that drew over 120,000 followers before most people knew his name. Three years later he performed "Until I Found You" at Glastonbury alongside Elton John. The crowd at Kemba ran younger than the music's vintage might suggest, which makes sense — this is a generation that found 1950s romanticism through a phone screen, and Sanchez is fluent in both languages.
Photographers were cleared after the third song. What remained was the room, the bulbs, and a twenty-year-old who has figured out, with unusual clarity, exactly who he is on stage.
Some artists spend a career searching for that. These two are already in the process of becoming it.
