Alex Warren Explains Why He Loves Fans Asking Him to Autograph Their Dead Parents’ Ashes

Alex Warren says fans have brought the ashes of loved ones to his shows and asked him to sign the containers. The TikToker-turned-singer made the comment in a conversation with Megan Moroney for the Musicians on Musicians issue of Rolling Stone.

“As I’ve made these songs and I played these shows, people will bring their dead parents to my show,” he said in the piece published Tuesday (Oct. 20). “They’ll put the ashes in the urn or in a bag, and they’ll bring them to my show and have me sign them.”

Warren noted that it would probably make “a lot of” other artists “uncomfortable,” but not him. “I love it,” he explained. “You get to keep that person alive with every conversation and you have this beautiful memory. You can’t control loss, you can’t control grief, but you can control how you react to it.”

The Hype House alum also feels a connection to fans who have lost parents. His father died of kidney cancer when Warren was 9 years old, and his mother died in 2021. That bond with listeners can also make hate comments more hurtful.

“If someone hates on me or my music, sadly that is me,” Warren told Moroney. “That’s me, motherf–ker. Someone’s like, ‘I hate this song. It’s bland, and it says nothing.’ I was like, ‘F–k, I wrote that song about my dead dad, a–hole.’”

“I feel the exact same way,” the country star agreed. “I’ve read everything I could read about myself. I’m a little numb to it, but yeah, it’s difficult to [hear], ‘I hate this song.’ That’s me. I didn’t make that up. That came straight up from me.”

Warren’s song “Ordinary” spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and launched a breakout year for him. His debut album, You’ll Be Alright, Kid, climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard 200 in August 2025, nearly a year after it first entered the chart. His 2026 follow-up, Wildchild, peaked at No. 2.

“My entire music career has been centered around healing my childhood self and I really think we did it,” he wrote on Instagram after Wildchild entered the chart. “These songs would have helped me so much growing up and I’m proud to think that it could be doing that for someone right now.”

Warren was also a best new artist nominee at last year’s Grammys. During his performance of “Ordinary” there, technical issues threw off his timing. The mishap scared him in the moment, but he now calls it “the best night of my life.”

“It instilled confidence in me, because I always thought that people hated me,” he told Moroney. “And some people do hate me. When that happened … I was like, ‘Everyone in this room hates me. Everyone’s making fun of me. Everyone’s talking about me. I don’t want to even see what the internet’s talking about.’ And all my friends are like, ‘Dude, check online’ … And I look and everyone’s like, ‘I know what happened. I figured out what happened, all these things.’ It was the best night of my life, and it was a freak accident.”

Warren and Moroney appear for Rolling Stone in the post below.

Source: Billboard