The Heartbreaking Truth Behind Alex Warren And His Music

Few musical artists in recent memory have skyrocketed to fame as quickly as Alex Warren. From his origins on social media to topping the Billboard charts, his rise has been as extraordinary as it's been rapid. Warren first came to prominence as a member of the Hype House, a collective of teenage TikTok performers living together in a glitzy Los Angeles mansion, which became successful enough to spawn a Netflix reality show.

Since then, Warren has collaborated with some of music's hottest acts, including K-pop sensation Rosé — the main singer for popular girl group Blackpink — and country superstar Jelly Roll. In the summer of 2025, his single "Ordinary" catapulted to the top of the charts; as of late July, the track had maintained its No. 1 position on Billboard's Hot 100 chart for its eighth consecutive week. Meanwhile, his debut album, "You'll Be Alright, Kid," earned a spot in the top 10. Meanwhile, Warren made headlines when he performed "Ordinary" at the 2025 edition of the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago, joined on stage for a duet with Luke Combs.

As his fans came to know, his success was not only hard fought, but reflected a dark history.

In Alex Warren's life, one figure continues to loom large: his father. Warren's dad continues to play a central role in Warren's journey, despite  — or perhaps because — he died when the youngster was just nine years old. Sadly, his death had been a long time coming, following a years-long struggle with kidney cancer. "Growing up, my dad knew he was dying. So that was something really difficult to grasp ..." Warren recalled in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

"I don't think I was coherent enough to understand what was happening until after the fact," Warrent told The Squeeze, expressing regret that he was too young to really get to know his father; everything he'd come to know about him, he explained, had been told to him by others. While Warren admitted he didn't remember much about his father, he'd left behind a wealth of home videos he shot during his final years. "He knew he was dying, and he knew that we weren't going to have a dad soon, so he filmed everything," Warren added.

Back in 2018, Warren paid tribute to his late father, sharing a photo on Instagram, revealing his father remained hugely influential in his life, and confirming his love for his late dad continued to inspire him. "I do everything I do to make him proud up there," he added.

The death of his father not only impacted Alex Warren, but it sent his mother reeling. His father had done well in real estate, and his death brought about some negative financial ramifications for his widow and their children. Suddenly, their once-prosperous lifestyle evaporated. "We were on food stamps, and my mum lost everything my dad built for us," Warren recalled when interviewed for The Guardian. 

According to Warren, his mother coped by drinking, and she was emotionally absent during a bleak time when he needed her more than ever. "My mom, at the time, was an alcoholic, so, like, she wasn't really present for my life," Warren recalled when interviewed by The Squeeze. "So I think just not having parents became really normal for me, really quickly."

Warren opened up even more about his mother during an episode of his podcast, in a clip that he posted on TikTok. "My mom was an amazing person," he said. "But my mom drunk was probably the worst person alive." As he explained in an interview with British talk show "Lorraine'" his mother had a tendency to become abusive toward him when she was drinking, which, sadly, was most of the time. "She was drunk," Warren said. "And she tended to be drunk more than she was sober."

Before his father's death, Alex Warren and his siblings put on impromptu performances, documented by the family's home video camera. Even as a youngster, Warren demonstrated an interest in music. "I was always running around in my underwear with this Fender guitar and there's so many videos of me as a kid doing it," he told The Hollywood Reporter. As he grew older, music became a form of solace, his means of coping with the grief surrounding his father's death, his fraught relationship with his mother, or even a breakup.

He was earnest about his love of music, which resulted in Warren becoming an object of ridicule and bullying. "As a kid, people bullied me for singing and doing talent shows and dedicating songs to my fifth grade girlfriend, you know?" he told BBC News.

Eventually, he shared his music on social media platforms, including YouTube, Instagram, and the now-defunct Musical.ly site. He began receiving appreciation, but continued to find himself a victim of bullying — this time of the online variety. "I was so used to getting bullied and hated for it," he added.

By the time he was a high school senior, Alex Warren began envisioning a future for himself in the world of social media, YouTube in particular. When he told his mother he wanted to pursue that dream instead of completing school, she took drastic action. "One day, she just kicked me out," he recalled during an appearance on Jake Paul's "Impaulsive" podcast. "She said, 'You have to go.' It was about 1 a.m."

Not knowing what to do, Warren sat in his family's driveway, and called every person in his contact list, asking for help. He received it, with friends offering him places to stay. "I'd sleep in their cars, I'd sleep in their houses," he said. 

Literally left homeless, Warren also realized the anxiety he should be feeling about his situation was overtaken by an entirely different feeling, one he hadn't been expecting. "I felt free," he told The Guardian, revealing he was hit with the realization that he would no longer have to shoulder his mother's abusive behavior. "I think anyone who's been in an abusive situation knows once you're out of it, no matter the circumstance, it is the most freeing feeling in the world, knowing you don't have to look over your shoulder and worry," he explained. 

It was during this uncertain period that Alex Warren met Kouvr Annon on Snapchat. They immediately hit it off, their connection growing deeper each time they communicated. One significant problem was present, though; Warren was in California, while Annon lived in Hawaii. In 2018, they began dating when she decided to leave home and join him, spending their nights curled up together in the back seat of his car (a scene they recreated in the music video for his single, "Give You Love").

"She slept in my car with me. She didn't have to do that," he recalled while appearing on talk show "Lorraine." During this time, the two began creating social media content, racking up an increasing number of views. That led them to partner with some other young aspiring social media to found the Hype House, living together in a swanky Los Angeles mansion while cranking out content. 

When taking a look inside the lives of the Hype House stars, it's clear that the concept proved effective. Not only did the Hype House propel Warren and Annon to a new level, providing him an audience when he shifted from video stunts to sharing his music, it also provided a launching pad for some other future stars: TikTok superstar Charli D'Amelio, and actor and singer Addison Rae, both of whom have gone on to bigger and better things since their Hype House days.

Alex Warren's relationship with his mother was fraught during the years he lived with her. After she kicked him out, however, their relationship deteriorated even further. 

Eventually, though, the chill between them began to thaw. As revealed during the podcast clip posted on TikTok, he was 21 when he and his mother had just started to repair the rift between them, speaking with each other for the first time after a long period of no communication. During that conversation, she revealed that she was now sober, and had been attending AA meetings. Sadly, that relationship was never repaired. "She died from liver failure and renal failure due to alcohol three months later," Warren added.

The fact that his mother died before they'd been able to come to terms with how much her alcoholism had impacted both their lives made her passing even more painful for him. "I never got the closure, I never got the 'I'm sorry,'" he said in an interview with The Squeeze.

Everything changed for Alex Warren when, as he told The Hollywood Reporter, he posted a video of himself singing, "thinking no one would see it, and I woke up the next day to 10 million views and everyone telling me I should do music." He knew he had an uphill battle convincing those who only knew him for his wacky Hype House antics that he had the goods as a singer and songwriter

As Warren saw it, the fame he'd achieved via social media was a double-edged sword, providing him with a pre-existing audience, but one with a predisposition for skepticism. "I think perceptually it did more damage than help in some way, as people typically don't want to take you seriously as you come from one thing," he mused. What made that transition easier was the songs he was writing were pulled directly from his own life experiences. "I think it would have been difficult if I didn't write things that were true about me," he told WTBU. 

Singing in front of audiences was a new mountain to climb, and his inexperience as a live performer was something he had to overcome. As he told WTBU, he learned by doing. "Now, I have experience," he said. "I'm a lot better than I was before, but I'm still learning. I'm still getting better."

In 2021, Alex Warren released the single, "One More I Love You," that quickly gained traction. As of August 2025, the track has been streamed more than 71 million times on Spotify, while the music video has racked up 6.3 million YouTube views. The introduction of the video lets viewers know the song is based on a true story: the tragic loss of his father when he was just a child.

That song had been years in the making — he was just 13 when he first began writing it — and detailed the complicated emotions he felt about his father's death. The song first began coming to him, he told BBC News, when he watched his sister attend a daddy-daughter dance without their late father. "I started mourning for the first time, and I didn't know how to process it, so I just went to the piano and played some chords," he said of how his childhood grieving process fueled his songwriting. "And that's kind of where I started learning how to write."

Yet for Warren, transforming his own personal trauma into entertainment for a mass audience isn't a gimmick, but has simply become what he does. "I think my story is something that a lot of people magnetize to," he told Headliner. "I've gone through a lot of traumatic things and I write all my music about all the traumatic things I've gone through."

During his The Hollywood Reporter interview, Alex Warren shared some insight into where he finds inspiration for his music. "I have a book called Alex's Songbook, and it's pretty much anything bad that's ever happened to me in my life," he explained. In this book, he writes down details of unpleasant incidents or how he's feeling down on a particular day. 

Working with his musical team, he'll often be playing piano and latch onto a melody, and develop it. Once the music is sorted out, he'll typically turn to his secret weapon. "Then I'll scroll through my book, and I'm like, oh my God, this feels like this one time I went through this, and I'll have titles written down already," he said.

That tangible link with his past trauma not only inspires his music but also informs the relationship he's developed with fans, who know all the ins and outs of his journey from losing his dad to homelessness and pop stardom. "They know what I've been through," he told Hits Daily Double why he always tries to connect one-on-one with fans, regardless of how busy he is. "That's why it's so important that I try to give everyone the time of day," he added. "It's important for me to make sure that these people know that they matter to me."

As was the case with "One More I Love You," music provided a way for Alex Warren could work through his feelings. It was a form of artistic expression that served as a form of therapy. That was particularly true with the song "First Time on Earth," from his debut album, "You'll Be Alright, Kid." "That was probably the song that took the longest ... I remember when we finished that song, I bawled my eyes out," he recalled in an interview with People. 

As he explained, the song addresses the closure that he never got to experience with either of his parents before their deaths. "This is a song for me to be able to kind of remind myself, but also have a conversation with them, if they can hear me, you know?" he explained.

Over time, Warren has also come to realize that the catharsis he experiences from his music isn't exclusive to him, and hits his fans just as powerfully. That was the case, he told BBC News, when he met a woman who had lost her son to cancer, and played "One More I Love You" at his funeral. "I think that's the most powerful thing in the world," Warren observed.

While their life stories are vastly different, it's actually easy to compare Alex Warren's music to that of Jelly Roll, a former convict and drug addict whose songs of feeling broken and overcoming past trauma have connected deeply with fans. For Warren, those painful moments from his past have become a touchstone in his music. Looking back, he's come to understand that without the suffering he experienced, he wouldn't have gone on to the level of success that he has, and wouldn't have come together with Kouvr Annon, whom he married in the summer of 2024. "If I didn't lose my parents, I wouldn't have met my wife and I wouldn't have a career, which is such a strange idea to think that I had to lose the two most important people in my life to be able to achieve the success I always thought I wanted," he told The Hollywood Reporter.

He expressed similar sentiments when interviewed by BBC News, explaining that his painful past not only helped him, and others, to heal, but also paved the way for his stardom. "Without all the loss, all the trauma, all the things in my life, I wouldn't have these songs," he said. "I wouldn't have the means to help the 5,000 people coming to the show tonight, I wouldn't be able to provide for my future family with my wife."

Having come of age within the harsh world of social media, Alex Warren is no stranger to the negativity that tends to pervade it. Paradoxically, the higher his star continues to rise, the more online hate he sees flung at him from Instagram, TikTok, X, and the like. He's dealt with it, he told People, by deleting various social media apps from his phone. "It's been difficult to not look at the hate and be like, 'You know what, I achieved this.'" As he explained, he'd come to the realization that the more he achieves and the greater his success becomes, so will the number of his haters. "And you just have to ignore it," he said. 

As Warren explained to The Day, the comments he reads online are overwhelmingly positive, but it's the handful of negative ones that stand out. Those few, he admitted, were the ones that eroded his confidence. "It hits a point where you have a thousand people loving you, but those two people not — you're like, 'Wait, are they ones telling me the truth? Is everyone else just gassing me up?"

Ultimately, he's come to understand that the biggest critic he faces is actually himself. "I'm my No. 1 hater," he added.