Alex Warren‘s wife knew his song “Ordinary” was a hit the first time she heard it.
In a new essay for Variety, the singer – and Variety’s pick for the Hitmakers Breakthrough of the Year Award – recalls writing the song about his wife and being so excited to play it for her in the car.
“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,"” he writes. “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?”
As it turns out, she had no notes – she just wanted to hear it again … and again.
“So I play it again, it finishes, she goes, ‘Play it again, please, this is insane,"” he recalls. “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 s***!"”
After that, he went to work convincing the world they needed to listen to it on replay, too. Alex tells Variety that by the time the song was officially released in February, he had posted around 100 different videos to social media featuring it.
“Ordinary” went on to spend 10 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
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