Alex Warren was homeless and sleeping in friends cars

Alex Warren is at the top of the world.

Ordinary, a song he wrote for his wife Kauvr after his wedding last year, is in number one in six different countries.

He has two more songs in the Top 40 of the United Kingdom, and his tour of the United Kingdom has been updated to places of 5,000 capacity, due to insatiable demand.

Backstage in the Hammersmith Apolo, the Californian singer is buried, humbly baffled by everything.

“All this is happening very fast,” he says. “I only wrote ordinary three months ago. I am sincerely impressed.”

But the 24 -year -old did not arrive out of nowhere.

He is one of the founders of Hype House, a Tiktok collaborative group that lived and worked together in Los Angeles hills and passed millions of teenagers through the pandemic.

You could easily discard it as another influencer of social networks that tries to enter the music industry. It is an accusation of which he is conscious and prepared.

“I saw many people, a lot of Tiktokkers, making music and hadn’t felt behind that. It was 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 demonstrations from other people. All this is mine.”

Even a passing look of his discography shows it well.

Warren’s pop hymns are very honest, almost to guilt, taking advantage of their challenging childhood and fairy tale romance with Kouvr.

His father died when he was nine years old, after a long fight with kidney cancer. The loss sent his mother in spiral to alcoholism, something Warren only realized when he tried to clarify one of his coffee cups.

“It turned out to be alcohol,” he says. “And the next day it was alcohol, and the next day it was alcohol, and 4 in the morning was alcohol, and when we drove, it was alcohol.”

When he called her, the addiction turned to abuse.

“Every person who fights with addiction needs someone to blame him, in addition to them, and I became that person,” he says.

When I was 18, she threw it. I was bankrupt and homeless. The friends let him sleep in his cars, never in their homes, because his mother had convinced his parents that it was a problem.

Almost at the same time, a friend in Snapchat introduced the Instagram model, Kouvr Annon.

“We just click immediately,” he says. “I felt that I could tell him everything, just after our first conversation.”

In four months, Kauvr left his family in Hawaii, flew to California and began living with Warren in a car.

Then, as now, they are an exceptionally beautiful, tender and funny couple clearly in love with each other. When they began publishing videos of their online romance, people wanted to see more. In a period of six months, Warren won more than one million followers on YouTube.

Combined with the joke videos he had filmed with his friends, he built a hearing large enough to start earning money.

“When I got my first check for $ 2,000 in a month, I thought, ‘Santa Vaca, this will change my life,'” he recalls.

Part of that money entered the creation of Hype House in 2019. Warren came up with the name and moved to the property with Annon and a lot of young internet stars such as Addison Rae, Charlie d’Amelio, Chase Hudson and Thomas Petrou.

The collective was presented in December 2019 with a photo shoot that imitated the Backstreet Boys video for I Want It That Way.

At the end of the day, the hashtag #Hypehouse was in a trend, and the mansion quickly became a viral video incubator.

The company prospered during the blockade, but, as individual members signed television offers, or tired of the growing content demands, began to crumble. Warren and Annon left in 2022, citing a desire to “move on to the next chapter of their lives.”

Since then, rumors have revolved on the drama behind the scene in the house, with some members insinuating exploitation and abuse.

“There was a fall” Warren told Zach Sang’s show in 2023. “But many of us signed, so no one is going to talk about it.”

He, however, poured his frustrations in music.

“How do you sleep at night?“Sing in anguish BurnedA song supposedly aimed at one of the co -founders of Hype House.

“It is scars forever when someone you call your friend / shows you the truth can be so cold“

Warren says he never earned money with Bombo’s house. However, what he gave him was an incorporated audience for his music.

“I think that’s really weird,” he says. “Usually, when someone goes from social networks to music, it loses that fan base.

“But I think many people saw my YouTube videos because they were having a difficult life and needed an escape. So, when I began to make music. my Hard life, I think they identified even more. “

Warren dreamed with a musical career long before he entered the Hype House. When Tiktok was called Music.Iry, he had even created a burner account to share his songs.

“I didn’t want to publish in my main account, because I was terrified to fail,” he explains.

“When I was a child, people intimidated me to sing and do talent shows and dedicate songs to my fifth grade girlfriend, you know?

“So I published in a random account that I created, and I filmed singing in the bathroom because I wanted to prove that I was not taking it seriously.

“And the next day, I woke up and had 10 million visits.”

His first release was One More I Love You of 2021, a song that began when he was 13 years old and reached an agreement with the death of his father.

“I saw my sister go to a dad-daughter dance without her father, and that was when I realized, ‘oh, wait, my life is different,” he recalls.

“I started crying for the first time, and I didn’t know how to process it, so I just went to the piano and played some chords. And that’s where I began to learn to write.”

Warren’s effusion is powerful in its simplicity, but has touched people in a way that could not have anticipated.

“The other day, a woman wanted to sign a Heinz Beans shirt,” he says. “I laughed because I thought it was fun, then she delivered it, and it was the same shirt as her son used just before she died of cancer.

“One More I Love You was the song that played on that funeral and the song he heard helped her overcome it.”

“I think that is the most powerful in the world.”

The musician, who was raised as a Catholic, believes that the healing moments like those are part of God’s plan for him.

“Without all the loss, all the trauma, all things in my life, I would not have these songs. I would not have the means to help the 5,000 people who come to the program tonight, I could not provide my future family with my wife.

“And I think those are all things that are destined to happen, or they can happen if I make the right decisions.

“You know, I could have chosen to enter drugs and be a bad person, but I chose this path.

“It’s the craziest.”