Alex Warren went into the 2026 Grammy Awards on a high. He was nominated for Best New Artist and scheduled to perform alongside his fellow nominees in a medley that would feature his hit single “Ordinary.” But 30 seconds before he hit the stage, just as Katseye concluded their performance, Warren realized his in-ears weren’t working. In the spirit of “the show must go on,” he continued with the performance anyway. There was clearly something wrong, but it was too late to fix it.
“It was horrifying,” Warren told Call Her Daddy, speaking about the malfunction for the first time. “We rehearsed it all week. All week, we were rehearsing. It was perfect. It went well, and to this day, I don’t know exactly what happened.” The singer thinks it might have had something to do with the radio frequency from the number of cell phones in use in the arena. Either way, he spent almost the entirety of his set not being able to properly hear himself.
“There’s no mix to it, so all I’m hearing is my voice super loud,” he said. “I get down to the steps, and then immediately I start hearing echoing on the right ear, so I take it out, and then that made it worse, stupidly, and so once I get on the stage, I hear it, and my ear gets a click again, and I put it right back in, and it’s fixed.” By then, the performance was nearly done, and he was standing on an elevated platform feet above the ground. “I just wanted to get over it, and once I got over it and once we were at the top, come on,” he continued. “I’m terrified of heights. I’m horrified of heights and that entire time I wasn’t thinking about, I was in the air. I was thinking, ‘Please get me back on time.’”
Warren received comforting words from Chappell Roan, who won Best New Artist in 2025. “She came up to me, and she was like, ‘Dude, if anyone understands, it’s the people in this room, and you sounded amazing,’” he said. “I was down, and I think she could tell, and she came up to my table and was the sweetest ever, and I was like, ‘I love you.’” Down seems to be an understatement. Warren recalled spending the rest of the ceremony shrinking into himself. “My head was on my wife’s shoulder the entire time. I did not wanna look up. I did not wanna talk to anybody,” he said. “Chappell, a hundred percent saw that I was just distraught, and she came up to me. It was just sweet.”
Warren wanted to leave the ceremony, especially when it came time for this year’s winner to be announced just after the medley. Backstage, he fought back tears as he was pushed to return to his seat in time for the reveal. “I sit down, and immediately, it goes into the nomination for Best New Artist, which I was up for, and immediately I’m like, I’m so destroyed,” Warren said. “I’m like, ‘There’s no shot I’m winning this. I just messed that up so bad.’” Olivia Dean took home the award. “I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ I mean, I was really happy for her. She deserved it a hundred percent, of course,” Warren added. “But once that happened, I was like, ‘Damn, I wanna go home.’”
