Alex Warren on the Creation of ‘Ordinary’ and His Social-Media Campaign to Make the Song Go Viral

It’s almost pointless to attach numbers to Alex Warren’s smash single “Ordinary” because they go out of date so quickly. The song passed a billion streams on Spotify alone in September and, as we write this, is well past 2 billion overall. It was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 10 weeks and for 13 weeks in the U.K. — the longest-running chart-topper of the decade in that country — and reached No. 1 in more than 20 countries all over the globe. It is also the No. 1 song of the year on Variety’s Hitmakers Top 25.

But although Warren is technically a new artist and the song seemed to come out of nowhere, neither is really accurate. The 25-year-old Carlsbad, Calif. native began posting YouTube videos at the age of 10 and co-founded the TikTok collective Hype House in 2019, which became a Netflix reality show three years later. He began posting songs in 2021, applying his by-then virtuoso social-media skills to promoting his music — and those skills proved key in breaking “Ordinary.” Warren estimates that by the time the song was officially released in February of this year, he had posted more than 100 different videos featuring it.

All of that is why Alex Warren is Variety’s Hitmakers Breakthrough of the Year. As for how it all happened, we’ll let him take it from here.

I write with Cal Shapiro, Mags Duvall, and Adam Yaron. The four of us were in a songwriting camp, staying in a house that we called the “Dust Bowl” because it was just full of dust and we were all getting sick from it, losing our voices as we’re trying to write songs.

That’s where the lyric, “Lord, return me to dust,” came from — we were quite literally making fun of the fact that room was so dusty. And the opening line, “They say the holy water’s watered down,” that was because the coffee in the coffee machine there was watered down — we made the joke while we were writing the verse and just went with it.

It’s so funny that people take apart the lyrics and analyze them and talk about all these different things, and we were just making a joke about the fact that whenever we write songs, something goes wrong, between the dust and coffee machine and the AC going out, whatever; someone says something so dumb that it’s funny and you’re like, “Wait a minute!” So now we’ll throw out the craziest shit when we’re writing, and it’s fun to see what transpires from it.

The music started as part of the writing camp: One night we watched the Nicolas Cage film “Family Man,” and we were meeting to write a song about love. We started with that [opening] arpeggiation on guitar, and it just kind of flowed out of us. Within the next 24 hours, “Ordinary” was done. It sounded so familiar, and we were sitting there trying to think of a song it sounded like, but we couldn’t.

I get goosebumps every time I sing it, and I believe every word that I’m singing. I had just gotten married, and it was really special for me to write a song about my wife and about falling in love. I was so excited to play it for her — I was begging for the [recording] so I could play it in the car with her.

Whenever I play her songs that I’ve written or even written about her, she’s like, “Yeah, that’s nice — my husband’s a singer, I hear it all the time.” But this time, I wish I’d had a camera: She looks straight at me and goes, “Play that again, right now.” I was like, oh no, is she going to give me notes?

So I play it again, it finishes, she goes, “Play it again, please, this is insane.” We drove the entire 45-minute car ride listening to the song over and over and over again. And every person I played it for went, “Holy shit!”

I was like, “I can’t wait to see what the world thinks of this song,” but I had to convince a lot of people that it was going to be the next single. So I went to social media and posted it an ungodly amount of times, probably 40 times before I got a yes, and then I posted over a hundred videos by the time the song came out.

When a musician writes a song, that’s art; and then to promote the music, I think it should be art, just as much. I have a background in social media and I love that aspect of it just as much as writing the song. And when I’m writing these songs, I’m like, “OK, cool, I can do it this way and that way and that way.” I made every video different.

I post a ton. I create different accounts just in case someone is like, “Oh god, this guy is posting so much.” There was like a time when I was posting seven if not 12 times a day across all my different accounts. I would film funny videos or cool transforms with my wife and put my songs over them.

And those videos helped me push this song through the pipeline. I had to prove that I could make the song do well — I had to prove it to myself and my writers and my label that I knew what I was doing and can carry my own weight. My label has been so supportive and they have great people who have helped me a lot, so I can’t take all the credit for it. But they’ve let me run with it, and I’ve definitely taken more of a leadership role with my team.

I think that everyone overthinks social media, especially musicians. A lot of artists, and rightfully so, think that it takes the art out of music — they might want their work to speak for itself, or have a kind of mysterious image. But it’s really difficult in today’s music climate to do that, and I actually kind of like the idea of explaining it. I think my music is very honest, so I do the same thing when it comes to social media.

Addison Rae is a friend of mine and we came from very, very similar places and we were part of the same thing. She’s done a really great job of being able to showcase her brand without necessarily posting a lot. It’s been cool to see exactly how she does it — they’re two different approaches, yet the same in a lot of ways. It’s really cool to see both of us having this kind of year.

I already had a lot of followers when I started releasing music, and they might have followed me for something completely different. And pivoting to music when I did, I had to win a lot of people over, and I also had to prove that I wasn’t just dabbling with it. I’ve done music since I was a kid, I started off on social media with music, and I just got pushed down every time. But I put in the work, singing every day, vocal lessons three times a week, learning music theory, really trying my best to kind of prove that I’m taking this seriously.

Early on, a lot of my TikToks were just me lip-syncing. I value average viewer duration, so I would watch when people would click off videos and want to know why — it’s most likely due to repetition, right? So I would do a build to a reveal, or create some kind of tension, so they want to stay until the end. It might be a lip-syncing video, but then I’d throw something at the camera, or I would jump up onto something and kind of infer that I was going to fall. And then you put text on it that’s a thought, like “This is what falling in love sounds like,” and it’s me running in the snow and then I fall because I’m so excited. Or then it’s me and my wife slow-dancing by the ocean with a beautiful view of the sunset.

I would make a visual that could go with the audio and then a text to go on screen to be able to send to people. So you could send the song to people because of the text; or if you didn’t want to send the song because of the text, you might want to watch the video because it was engaging; or maybe you just liked the song: three different things that check the list. That was kind of a formula to make the song go viral. 

And that’s how you build a trust with an audience after a few videos, which I think I’ve been able to do.

Songwriters: Mags Duval, Cal Shapiro, Alex Warren, Adam Yaron

Producer: Adam Yaron

Label: Atlantic Records

Hitmakers: Brian Sokolik – Alex Warren Manager, Managing Partner at Odd Projects  
Adam Yaron – Producer/Songwriter  
Jack Dytrych – Alex Warren Content Producer  
Michael Parker – SVP, A&R Atlantic Records  
Justin Horowitz – VP, Digital Marketing Atlantic Records 

Publishers: Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp., Songs With a Pure Tone, Music of Big Family, In Honor of Alice Publishing, Down Harbor Creations, Adam Yaron Music