Alex Warren walked into a New York City classroom in Queens expecting to teach a lesson about creativity. He probably didn’t expect the students to immediately start asking about his bank account.
In a new episode of Celebrity Substitute that arrived Wednesday (Sept. 9), the Grammy-nominted singer steps in to lead a group of second graders at PS 111, where the kids waste no time getting to know their celebrity guest.
“Do you have a lot of money?” one little boy asks.
“I don’t. I don’t have a lot of money,” Warren responds.
The musician explains that he tries to make music because he loves it “not because of what else comes with it,” before turning the question around on the students and asking about their own goals. When asked about his biggest goal, Warren has an incredibly wholesome answer: “I want to be a dad.”
The students also get curious about what Warren’s home life is like. After learning that the singer has a wife, one student asks how long they’ve been together. Warren shares that he met his wife when he was 18 and that “we slept in a car for a long time.”
“Yeah, yeah, it was very romantic,” he jokes.
These days, Warren’s living situation looks a little different. He tells the class that he and his wife share their home with four dogs, three horses and two cats. Naturally, the kids have burning questions.
“Do you have a mansion for that?”
“I don’t. I have a big yard,” Warren says, explaining that he has plenty of land where he and his friends can hang out.
And when Warren is asked which artist he’d want to be, he has an answer ready: Shawn Mendes.
“I really like Shawn Mendes,” he tells the class, before describing the Canadian pop star as “the human embodiment of a beautiful being.” Warren then jokes that people told him he looked like Mendes in high school, although he insists, “I don’t see it.”
As part of the classroom for Celebrity Substitute, a digital series hosted by Julian-Shapiro Barnum, Warren teaches the students about creativity by helping them come up with and film a music video for his song “Emerald Eyes,” which he wrote as a love song for his wife.
“I wanted a love song that was kind of tailored to my wife,” Warren says. “A lot of the ones I make are very general and you know, you can kind of apply it to whatever.”
The students come up with ideas for the video, including summer-themed scenes, dancing and giant green eyes inspired by the song’s title. Warren decided to put the kids in charge of filming portions of the video all by themselves.
“There’s a lot of ways to be creative, you guys,” he tells them. “My way of being creative is making music.”
The lesson also allowed Warren to look back on why creativity became so important to him. He says he wished creativity had been something offered as a class when he was growing up, explaining that he didn’t feel comfortable expressing himself until later in life.
“When I was homeless and all these different things, it was like, oh cool, I have to be creative and have to think outside the box,” he says.
That history makes the other half of his Celebrity Substitute appearance really meaningful. While Warren taught the students, the school’s community pantry was given a makeover with groceries, organizational supplies and household items from Amazon.
After seeing the renovated pantry, Warren reflected on his own childhood and the teachers who did support him.
“I used to go to lunch all the time, I had no one to sit with and I’d sit with my teachers,” he says. “So there was a huge amount — like, I go back all the time to say hi. They were a huge part of my life.” He adds that the revamped pantry gives families a way to access necessities “without feeling the shame or the guilt that this is what we need to survive.”
By the end of the episode, Warren admits that his nerves about returning to an elementary school classroom have disappeared.
“I was so scared, but honestly, I don’t want to leave now,” he says. “These kids are so amazing.”
Watch the full Celebrity Substitute episode below.
