Alex Warren is Anything But ‘Ordinary’

When Alex Warren was a kid, he loved wandering around his house, singing. His mother would berate him for it, telling him he had no talent. So at age 18 when Warren performed “One More I Love You” on a talent show, his lack of confidence got the best of him, and he was instantly voted off.

“I realized I had really bad stage fright,” he tells me, from a hotel somewhere in Ohio, though he’s not sure where. “I was just scared of failing.”

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Two years later, in 2021, he released “One More I Love You” as his debut single. A song he wrote at age 13 about his childhood trauma, it has since garnered more than 62 million streams on Spotify. Later that same year, he released two more singles: “Remember Me Happy” and “Screaming Underwater.”

Warren, who is currently on his sold-out headlining Cheaper Than Therapy global tour, has recently announced a 15-date extension for a second North American leg, totaling 62 dates—which explains why he’s unable to recall which city he’s in.

“I’m touring 10 months out of the year,” he says. “I’m never home.”

It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that Warren’s career is exploding.

The Carlsbad, California, singer-songwriter was named Billboard’s January Chartbreaker with a reimagined version of “Burning Down,” with Joe Jonas, a track originally from his debut album, 2024’s You’ll Be Alright, Kid (Chapter 1). The single marked Warren’s first time breaking onto the Billboard Hot 100 and has now amassed more than 185 million streams, reaching No. 1 on the global charts in eight countries. And then there’s “Ordinary,” released in February, which has more than 193 million streams and, as of this writing, currently sits at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 for the third week in a row. The song is about his now-wife, Instagram model Kouvr Annon, whom he met while he was homeless after getting kicked out of the house at 18 by his mother.

“Like the alcoholic, abusive mom, she was always kicking me out of the house…” Warren says. “The day I turned 18, she stormed into my room and said, ‘Alright, time to go.’ So I left, and I never came back. I was sleeping in my friends’ cars, and whenever their parents would go to bed, they’d let me come into their house and sleep on the floor sometimes or share a bed with them. So I was kind of all over the place. And then I met my wife, and I was sleeping in cars still, and she decided to sleep in cars with me for, I think, two weeks or three weeks, we were together doing that.”

What he doesn’t mention is that Annon left her family in Hawaii and moved to California to do this.

While Warren may be on the verge of becoming one of the biggest stars on the planet, he still sometimes hears his mother’s voice inside his head tell him: “You can’t do this.”

Warren’s mother started drinking heavily after his father died from kidney cancer when he was 9. He says he was as close as a 9-year-old can be with his father.

“I think the struggle I have a lot is I find out more about him through people than I did through him, and the videos he left us, which is something really sweet,” Warren says. “I’m constantly thinking about who he was as a man, as I’m this age, where he was in his life. And it’s cool. I was in a mall the other day, the one he grew up going to, and I felt very at home.”

Before he died in 2009, Warren’s father would take him and his four siblings on weekly outings to show them a new talent, from surfing to skateboarding.

That desire for his kids to be well-rounded and active wasn’t limited to sports. When Warren was 6 years old, his father bought him his first guitar, a Fender. “We would have home talent shows, and it would be me on guitar, my little sister would sing, my older sister would play piano, and my brother would play drums. And I fell in love with it. And so as I got older and as time went on, I would do talent shows, and I was god-awful.”

Those old home videos of his father that Warren would watch inspired him to create his own videos and post them online when he was 11; mainly silly stuff like doing backflips on the trampoline and the Doritos commercial he and his siblings made.

Over the next few years, Warren continued to upload videos, mostly pranks and other humorous content. But when he began chronicling his budding relationship with his then-girlfriend Annon, starting from his homeless days sleeping in his car, he gained more than a million followers in six months.

Then he got his first check for $2,000.

In 2019, Warren, along with Annon and fellow TikTok influencers Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, Chase Hudson, and others, moved into the Hype House, a mansion where they all lived together and created online content for the platform, garnering millions of fans.

During all of this, however, Warren still dreamt of being a musician, despite the insecurities his mother planted in his head. The Hype House gave him the confidence to try it again.

“If you go all the way down my social media, the first videos I ever posted were me singing,” says Warren. “I really wanted to be a singer. And it just never worked, never got views, never got discovered. I got made fun of, bullied in high school, so I kind of just gave up on it. And then I started doing the social media thing, and that took off right when I started.”

Warren took his social media success as a sign that perhaps being a musician wasn’t so unrealistic. So, while he was living at the Hype House, sitting on the toilet, he tells me, he posted a video of himself singing. The next morning, he woke up to discover his video had 10 million views.

“Everyone was like, ‘Oh my god, you should put out a song. You sound so good,’” he says. “And then I dropped ‘One More I Love You’ and started pursuing music.”

In 2022, he signed with Atlantic Records and released his first album two years later. While he gained recognition for songs such as “Carry You Home” and “Burning Down,” it was “Ordinary” that got Warren to where he is now: on the verge of superstardom.

He and Annon, who have been together seven years, got married in June 2024. “She comes with me on tour everywhere, and we get to travel the world,” he says.

Though Warren’s mother died in 2021, he still can’t get the cruel things she said to him out of his head. I ask him if he feels like his mother’s abuse helped push him harder to obtain success in an effort to prove her wrong.

“I think I work a lot harder to prove that to someone who isn’t here to prove it to, if that makes sense,” he says. “I can’t be like, ‘See Mom, I told you I could do it.’ But there’s definitely someone in my ear, and it tends to be the depiction of my mom. Everything I do, I’m my biggest hater. A lot of people are always like, ‘Oh, you’ve done so well for yourself, how cool is it?’ and it’s crazy because I don’t think I celebrate the wins, which is something I have to work on. I credit a lot of my success to the fact that I do that, but at the same time, it’s so horrible for my mental health.”

On May 22, Warren released a new single, a collaboration with Jelly Roll called “Bloodline,” a song they performed together at the Stagecoach Festival in April.

Alex Warren and Jelly Roll collaborate on their new single "Bloodline" — Alex Warren and Jelly Roll collaborate on their new single “Bloodline”

The new single is an ode to his older brother, who, like many children of alcoholics, struggles with the mental health challenges that come from growing up in such a dysfunctional household, particularly when it comes to people-pleasing and seeking others’ approval.

“I only know how to write sad songs or love songs because that’s kind of my two things,” he says. “Funny enough, my brother joined the military for my mom, and my mom passed away. And then he realized that that was not the life that he wanted. And he struggled with mental health. And so it was something important for me…that’s where our relationship really bonded and got strong, over the fact that we both come from a weird bloodline and a weird, traumatic family.”

Warren says the life he has is a trade-off. But he’s fine with it. “I live a very cool life, and that’s something I’m very thankful for,” he says. “And at the same time, I have my own battles. I’m 24, I’ve got time to figure that out…to walk through life and experience it all.”

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.