Warren designed the album – which features previous clients Celine Dion and Paloma Faith alongside newcomers such as G-Eazy and Ty Dolla $ign – to showcase her range. She’s Fire by Diane Warren, G-Eazy and Carlos Santana. This means, she says, “Some of my best songs have not been heard yet.” After some back and forth, she figured: why not release it under her own name? Back when she was writing such songs as I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing for Jerry Bruckheimer blockbusters (“girl songs for boy movies”), she would work to a brief, but usually she writes for herself, so that when a request comes in there’s always something in the vault. A while back, she took a ballad called Where Is Your Heart to John Legend, who recorded it but didn’t release it.
I am a writing camp.”Īt 65, Warren is now releasing her debut album, The Cave Sessions Vol 1. “Are they getting the coffee? Coming up with a hi-hat pattern in the bridge? I don’t need a writing camp. “I don’t know, when there’s 12 writers on a song, what exactly they’re doing,” she says. Almost uniquely in modern pop, she prefers to work alone. She does occasionally take a holiday but six days is her limit. She writes seven days a week when she’s in LA and has never had writer’s block. Warren is “obsessed with writing songs, more so now than ever”. I’ve basically lived in there more years than not.” Even though she’s wealthy enough to have bought an entire building in the same street for her Realsongs publishing company, Warren still rents the Cave because she’s a creature of habit. As soon as we finish talking, she’ll be off to work on a song at “the Cave”, the Hollywood Hills office she has used since 1985. Warren literally has a green curtain behind her, prohibiting any glimpse of her surely fabulous home via Zoom. I’m like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.” I have a great gig because a lot of people don’t know me. Some of these artists I work with can’t even walk down the street. Growing up in Van Nuys, California, Warren admired songwriters more than performers. “She likes attention,” says the songwriter. We are joined intermittently by her cat Rabbit, who jumps on Warren’s lap, uses her leg as a scratching post, eats paper and so on. Wearing a grey top, a checkerboard scarf and large horn-rimmed glasses, she has a buzzy, fast-talking energy, like the salty best friend in a Nora Ephron movie. It’s 8am in Los Angeles and Warren is chugging coffee like she’s filling up a car. Lady Gaga performs Til It Happens to You, co-written with Diane Warren, at the 2015 Academy Awards. “I have two of the Beatles singing on my song,” she says fannishly. Warren provided a theme song for the Biden-Harris campaign called The Change, a feminist anthem for Michelle Obama called This Is for My Girls, and Here’s to the Nights, a lockdown pick-me-up for Ringo Starr with backing vocals by Paul McCartney. Six of her 12 Oscar nominations have come in the past seven years and one of those songs, for the documentary RBG, prompted a thank you note from supreme court judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself. In 2015, Til It Happens to You, her potent Lady Gaga collaboration for a documentary about campus rape, made her once again the pop equivalent of the striker you turn to when you absolutely have to score a penalty. To be imperial in one pop era is usually to be defined by it for evermore, but Warren has been writing hits for almost four decades, notching up nine US No 1s and 32 Top 10 hits.
The discs celebrated the windswept mega-hits Warren had written for Toni Braxton (Un-Break My Heart), LeAnn Rimes (How Do I Live), Celine Dion (Because You Loved Me) and Aerosmith (I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing), the first two of which are still among the bestselling US singles ever. A t the end of the 1990s, when Diane Warren was the unrivalled queen of the power ballad, her music publisher presented her with a quartet of gold discs and a plaque hailing her as “the career saviour of the 90s”.
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