“God is love,” 1 John 4:8 tells us. Read on for a few more verses, and we find these words: “We love because he first loved us” (v. 19). So it shouldn’t come as a great shock when pop musicians make the link between love and the divine, too.
That’s exactly what California singer-songwriter Alex Warren has done with his humbly-titled Top 5 hit “Ordinary.” In a nutshell, Warren says that his wife, Kouvr Annon (who stars in the song’s video with him) is anything but ordinary. In fact, so passionate is their love that, he claims, makes “the angels up in the clouds … jealous.”
Throughout the song, Warren—whose voice and almost worshipful style brings to mind artists such as Hozier, Benson Boone and Avicii—employs biblical images, ideas and phrases to describe his beloved.
Warren is a Catholic, and he’s said that one of his cowriters, Mags Duval, is a Christian as well. That background, he told the UK’s officialcharts.com, helped to shape this song: “We take a lot of biblical references and were inspired a lot by worship music. These aren’t worship songs [on Warren’s forthcoming album], but with “Ordinary,” for example, we wanted to create a love song that said ‘our love is so strong that angels in Heaven—a perfect place with perfect people—are jealous of the love we’ve found.
He also added, “Not everyone we work with is religious, but I just love people’s stories in general. I’m not writing about God, I’m just giving perspective that everyone can digest.”
With that background in mind, let’s take a look at the perspective on love we find in “Ordinary.”
Warren borrows biblical language and imagery at a number of points in the song, because he’s yearning to communicate how transcendent his love for his wife is. Here’s the core of that romantic confession, which we get repeatedly in the chorus: “Oh my, my/Oh my, my love/I take one look at you/You’re takin’ me out of the ordinary.”
A bit later in the song, he sings, “Hopeless hallelujah/On this side of gate/
Oh, my life, how do ya/Breathe and take my breath away?”
Obviously, Warren was, is and continues to be deeply in love with his wife, whom he pursues through a fanciful video that keeps changing scenes each time he almost catches her.
The sentiment here is a sweet one, and this man’s utter devotion to his wife is praiseworthy … to a point.
Where Warren’s sentiments on love wander romantically off track, however, is when he begins to worship this woman herself instead of the God who orchestrated their love. She often usurps God as the object of worship in Warren’s heart—at least in this song.
“At your altar, I will pray” he gushes. “You’re the sculptor, I’m the clay.” Warren misappropriates the latter metaphor which describes God as our sculptor repeated in Scripture (see Isaiah 64:8, Jeremiah 18:1-10).
And elsewhere in the chorus we hear, “Somethin’ so out of the ordinary/You got me kissin’ the ground of your sanctuary.” As for her touch, Warren hyperbolically describes it with using language similar Genesis 3:19: “Shatter me with your touch, oh Lord, return me to dust.”
Warren also describes her a source of light, a lyric that could likely be read both positively and problematically depending upon the theological lens you’re using: “World was in black and white until I saw your light/I thought you had to die to find/Something so out of the ordinary.”
And, well, we’re not quite done unpacking the spiritual stuff here that gets a bit biblically sideways. Warren repeats these lines, too: “On the edge of your knife, stayin’ drunk on your vine/The angels up in the clouds are jealous, knowin’ we found/Something so out of the ordinary.”
While the reference to a vineyard could be taken at face value, given Warren’s familiarity with biblical references, it seems plausible that these lines are paraphrases of Jesus’ words in John 15:5: “‘I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.’”
In addition to that reference to getting drunk on love, elsewhere we also have another comparison to love’s drug-like effects: “Somethin’ so heavenly, higher than ecstasy/Whenever you’re next to me, oh my, my.”
Finally, one mildly suggestive reference is worth noting as well: “I want you layin’ me down ’til we’re dead and buried.”
I’m a romantic. I cry at movies. I love a good love song. And, frankly, this one’s pretty catchy.
And on one level, I find myself hesitant to be too critical of Alex Warren’s beautiful ode to marital love here. Heaven knows, we don’t get much of that in pop culture. So kudos to Warren for loving his wife, and unabashedly letting the world know how crazy he is about her.
That said, I can’t quite let him off the hook here theologically. That’s because several of Warren’s lyrics cross a line from loving his wife into, quite literally, worshiping her as the source of his meaning and purpose in life. “At your altar, I will pray/ … You got me kissin’ the ground of your sanctuary.”
Those descriptions of Warren’s wife move from receiving her as a good and beautiful gift from God to lavishing praise upon her that should be going to their Creator.
So even in a song that is, in some ways, a winsome and lovely portrait of marital bliss, we’ve still got to keep our eyes open for how those emotions morph into idolatry—however well intended it might be.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
