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Alex Warren is on top of the world. Ordinary, a song he wrote for his wife Kouvr after their wedding last year, is at number one in six different countries. He has two more songs in the UK Top 40, and his UK tour has been upgraded to 5,000-capacity venues, due to insatiable demand.
Backstage at the Hammersmith Apollo, the Californian singer is endearingly, humbly bewildered by the whole thing. “All of this is happening really quickly,” he says. “I only wrote Ordinary three months ago. I’m honestly blown away.”
But the 24-year-old didn’t arrive out of nowhere. He’s one of the founders of the Hype House – a collaborative TikTok group who lived and worked together in the Los Angeles hills and shepherded millions of teenagers through the pandemic.
You could easily dismiss him as yet another social media influencer trying to break into the music industry. It’s an accusation he’s aware of, and prepared for. “I watched a lot of people, a lot of TikTokkers, make music and there was no meaning behind it. It was just something they decided to do,” he says. “But I wanted to write about real things. No one else can sing my songs. I don’t take other people’s demos. This is all mine.”
Even a passing glance at his discography proves him right. Warren’s arena pop anthems are searingly honest, almost to a fault, drawing on his challenging childhood, and fairytale romance with Kouvr.
His father died when he was nine years old, after a long struggle with kidney cancer. The loss sent his mother spiralling into alcoholism, something Warren only realised when he tried to clear up one of her coffee mugs. “It turned out to be alcohol,” he says. “And the next day it was alcohol, and the next day it was alcohol, and at 4am it was alcohol, and when we were driving, it was alcohol.”
When he called her out on it, the addiction turned to abuse. “Every person struggling with addiction needs someone to blame it on, besides themselves, and I became that person,” he says.
When he was 18, she kicked him out. He was broke and homeless, struggling to survive on the streets. He started singing to cope with the trauma, and eventually discovered his passion for music. “I started writing songs when I was at my lowest point,” he says. “I was in a hotel room, and I was so lonely. I picked up the guitar, and I started writing.”
Warren’s outpouring of grief is powerful in its simplicity, but it has touched people in ways he couldn’t have anticipated. “The other day, a woman wanted me to sign a Heinz Beans t-shirt,” he says. “I giggled because I thought that was funny, then she turned it over, and it was the same t-shirt her son wore right before he died from cancer. One More I Love You was the song that she played at that funeral and the song she listened to help her get over it.”
“I think that’s the most powerful thing in the world.”
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