“It was horrifying. All week, we were rehearsing. It was perfect. I don’t know exactly what happened”: Alex Warren on his Grammys night in-ear monitor mishap

Alex Warren, the sometime YouTuber turned pop star, has been talking about what happened at this year’s Grammys ceremony, when he was part of a medley with his fellow nominees for Best New Artist.

Warren performed a portion of his megahit Ordinary, but his in-ear monitors weren’t working, and so his section wasn’t quite as jaw-dropping as it should have been.

Appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Warren said: “It was horrifying. 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.”

He suggested that it could have been down to the sheer number of phones in the audience interfering with the frequency. But whatever the cause, Warren was not able to hear himself properly.

Alex Warren: The Grammys, Hype House & Homelessness - YouTube

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“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 over, and he was on an elevated platform a hundred feet above the ground. “I’m terrified of heights. I was thinking, ‘Please get me back on time.'”

Never mind. When he got his feet back on solid ground, Chappell Roan, the winner of last year’s Best New Act, was able to offer some comforting words: “She came up to me, and she was like, ‘Dude, if anyone understands, it’s the people in this room, and you sounded amazing.' 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.'”

Despite Roan’s consoling gesture, Warren said that the incident had rather spoiled the evening for him. He left after Olivia Dean's victory in the category he had been nominated in was confirmed. “I mean, I was really happy for her,” he explained. “She deserved it a hundred percent, of course. But once that happened, I was like, ‘Damn, I wanna go home.'”

Still, there’s always next year...