WHY DOES EVERYTHING SOUND LIKE AN AUDITION SONG FOR 'THE VOICE'?

Hits like Alex Warren's “Ordinary,” Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” and more Hot 100 tracks are just two recent examples.

- By Larisha Paul

Alex Warren's breakthrough single, “Ordinary,” has a backstory made for TV. The 24-year-old artist wrote it about his wife, Kouvr Annon, whom he started dating when they were both 18. It wasn’t the best time to jump into something so new and intense. He’d already experienced the grief of losing his father as a child, only to be kicked out of his home as soon as he reached legal age. His mother, struggling with alcoholism, wanted him gone. With nowhere to go, Warren ended up living in his car. Four months later, Annon left home to join him.

Warren’s story has all the fixings of an underdog narrative: love, loss, a light at the end of the tunnel. These are the boxes producers typically hope to check when setting the scene for an audience to meet a new artist for the first time – not the producers shaping records in the recording studio but those making singing-competition television series like The Voice and American Idol. The format is predictable. The almighty TikTok algorithm assured that Warren didn’t need to trauma dump on The Voice or American Idol to find his audience. But if he had, “Ordinary” would have been his ticket to a four-chair turn.

The single, which recently reached Number Two on the