Alex Warren had last year’s biggest hit single with “Ordinary,” a song whose title was a cleverly unflamboyant statement of principle. The 25-year-old California singer-songwriter staked out his turf by taking pride in the ordinariness of his hit, from the mild-mannered vocals to the drama-free sincerity of his romantic imagery. As he declared in his credo of a hook, “We’ll make the mundane our masterpiece.” It was a song that dared you to roll your eyes at it, but then made it feel stupid and obvious to do so. Not a bad trick.
But more to the point, it was a song that dared to go for earnestly open-hearted romance, with Warren wisely refusing to outsmart himself, resisting any urge to throw in any fancy plot twists or angles. The ordinariness of it was the whole point — which is how it built up into the monster universal hit it became. That’s why “Ordinary” is going to be a wedding song until your grandkids are getting divorced.
Wildchild is another clever title — on the surface, it’s pretty much the opposite of what anyone would expect from Warren in terms of his vocal personality. But there’s plenty of emotional turbulence in his life story, and he isn’t shy about digging deeper into that on his second album. He’s inspired by the death of his father, who gave him the nickname “Wildchild” growing up, and by marrying the love of his life. “I’m a two-trick pony,” he likes to joke onstage. “I write songs about my dead parents, and I write songs about my wife.”
His father died of cancer when Warren was only nine, and he spends much of the album singing the goodbyes he never got to say. “Wildchild” is his touching farewell to his father — his dad’s favorite star was John Mayer, so Warren brings in Mayer to play a guitar solo, which adds a level of real-life poignance. “Rescuer” chronicles the hard times he and his wife lived through in their teens — just a few years ago, the couple was living in his car, after he got thrown out of the house by his alcoholic mother (who died in 2021).
Warren always comes off as likeably warm, kindly, and earnest, even if he’s still learning how to find his voice as a songwriter. The music gets bogged down in bland balladry like “Cry Wolf,” especially when he tries to go for arena-size bombast without the hooks or choruses to sustain it. He stumbles back into cliches already beaten into the ground by the likes of Mumford & Sons or the Lumineers; his melodies could use more personality, just as his riffs could use more kick and bite.
His biggest strength, as on the first album, is writing happy love songs, celebrating passionately enduring relationships between adults who (gasp) like each other. That’s basically the toughest trick any songwriter can attempt, which is why so few of them try it. But the world can never get enough of them, which helps him get over in tunes like “Fine Place to Die” or “Fever Dream” — he leads with the heart, which is definitely the smartest strategy for him. It’s the positive love songs that bring out his eye for narrative details, like missing the sight of her “shoes on the steps” in “Last Time,” or the line in “Emerald Eyes” where he’s “sweating through the sheets like it’s summer ’19.” That kind of detail says so much more than cliches about angels or clouds. (He shouldn’t bother writing breakup songs at all; his heart doesn’t seem to be in them, and it shows.) It’s too soon to tell where Alex Warren might go from here, but the sincere warmth of Wildchild makes you want to root for him.
