FEATURE:
The Digital Mixtape
IN THIS PHOTO: Diane Warren at the 98th Academy Awards ion 15th March, 2026. She was nominated for Best Original Song for Dear Me, from the documentary, Diane Warren: Relentless/PHOTO CREDIT: Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Diane Warren at Seventy
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THIS biography might…
be a little out of date but, when Diane Warren was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, we got some biography about her. This is one of the most successful and talented songwriters ever. Ahead of her seventieth birthday on 7th September, I did want to spotlight this legend:
“Diane Warren is one of modern music’s most celebrated songwriters. She has penned nine #1 and thirty-three Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, and is tied for having written the most #1 songs as a sole writer in Billboard history. Her distinguished catalogue features beloved songs including “Only Love Can Hurt Like This,” “Un-Break My Heart,” “If I Could Turn Back Time” and “Rhythm of the Night.”
She has received 15 Academy Award nominations, is a GRAMMY winner with 15 nominations, an Emmy winner, and a two-time Golden Globe winner whose songs have been featured in more than 150 films, including chart-topping hits “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” (Mannequin, 1987) “Because You Loved Me” (Up Close and Personal, 1996) “How Do I Live” (Con Air, 1997) “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” (Armageddon, 1998 ) and “Til It Happens To You” (The Hunting Ground, 2015). In November 2022, Warren became the first songwriter in history to receive an Honorary Oscar, as voted on by the Academy’s Board of Governors. Most recently, she wrote the original song “The Fire Inside,” performed by Becky G for the film Flamin’ Hot, directed by Eva Longoria, which marked her 15th Oscar nomination.
She is the sole owner of her publishing company Realsongs, the most successful female-owned and operated business in the music industry. Warren is a recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a nod to her legendary career, having worked with many of today’s most popular artists, including Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, H.E.R., Snoop Dogg, Paloma Faith, Jon Batiste, Maren Morris, John Legend, Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson, Andra Day, Justin Bieber, Jennifer Hudson and Janelle Monáe, in addition to having written songs for iconic artists such as Whitney Houston, Cher, Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, and many more”.
Diane Warren has been nominated for seventeen Academy Award nominations for Best Original Song but has never won. I think she had found the funny side, though it is scandalous that she has never won! In March, Diane Warren was interviewed by The Telegraph. She reflected on her career and missing out on an Oscar once more:
“I love proving people wrong. It’s my favourite thing to do,” grins Diane Warren. “I proved my mom wrong when she said I couldn’t make a living writing songs. Cos, I f---ing could!” This is an understatement. My 69-year-old Californian interviewee is one of the most successful songwriters of all time, with a self-owned back catalogue of songs worth an estimated half-a-billion dollars. “Although I won’t tell how much I’ve been offered for it – and I’d never sell, anyway,” she tells me. “My soul’s not for sale.”
Which means that, although you might not recognise the name Diane Warren, you’ll know a wind tunnel’s worth of her belt-em-out ballads. She’s the one-woman hit-maker behind nine US number-one songs and 33 top-10 hits including Starship’s Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now (1987), Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time (1989), Toni Braxton’s Un-Break My Heart (1996), Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing (1998) and Paloma Faith’s Only Love Can Hurt Like This (2014).
Often at her best writing the kind of songs that swell the emotional sails of blockbuster movies, she’s got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She’s got a Grammy (for Because You Loved Me from the 1996 movie Up Close and Personal), two Golden Globe Awards (for You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me from 2010’s Burlesque and lo si (Seen) from 2020’s The Life Ahead) and a Primetime Emmy (for Til It Happens to You from 2015’s The Hunting Ground).
Despite an unprecedented 17 Academy Award nominations, however, she still hasn’t won the Oscar for Best Original Song written for a Motion Picture. And this really bugs her. Unlike most LA types who feign cool disinterest in shiny statues, Warren is campaigning hard for her latest song ahead of next week’s ceremony. “And this time”, she says, “it’s personal”, because her song, Dear Me, is the tender ballad she wrote for the documentary about her own life, Diane Warren: Relentless.
The docu-film offers raw insight into the eccentric existence of the scrappy workaholic who has been described as a “mogul-urchin” as well as, because of her reclusive nature, the “Emily Dickinson of pop”. She is known to relentlessly badger A-list singers until they listen to the demos she records using her “awful” nasal voice in her cave of an office, crammed with teetering stacks of cassettes. Relentless opens with Cher’s assertion that Warren is “nuts” (Warren pushed so hard for Cher to record If I Could Turn Back Time that she paid for a studio even though Cher said she “hated” the song), followed by streams of praise from artists such as Beyoncé and Steve Tyler.
Most fascinating, perhaps, is the revelation that though Warren has made her fortune writing love songs, she has never been in love. “A lot of people think I’m gay,” she shrugs on camera. “I’m not.” She just prefers to “sleep with my cat”, and finds some of the physical acts of affection she describes in her lyrics make her wince. Warren cringes when asked to unpack the lines she wrote for Aerosmith’s Oscar-nominated I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing (from Armageddon): “I don’t want anybody kissing my eyes. I don’t want anybody staying up all night to hear me breathe. What the f--- are you kissing my eyes for?”
The documentary’s director Bess Kargman drafts in one of Warren’s collaborators, Paul Stanley of Kiss, to play the role of psychiatrist, with Stanley suggesting that perhaps “it’s easier to write about heartbreak when you don’t have to live it, but you fear it.”
Talking today via Zoom from a tidy conference room at her LA office, Warren shrugs off Stanley’s theory. “I don’t think I’m fearful of [love],” she mulls. “I’m just not the most trusting person, you know? I just don’t want to wake up with someone or sleep with anybody, or answer to anybody.” The widescreen romance expressed in songs, she says, is the product of “a good imagination, y’know? When I’m writing, I can feel what that feels like. It’s like method acting”.
Viewers might suspect that Warren’s wariness of romance has its roots in a difficult upbringing. Dear Me is, after all, a song addressed to her childhood self. It is full of tender assurances that “[while] you feel like nobody understands… like the whole world’s against you… all of the pain is all gonna fade”. As she tells me today more bluntly: “Being a kid sucks.”
Running away from home
Born in 1956 to insurance salesman David, and hypercritical housewife Flora, who never showed her children any physical affection, Warren grew up in the lower-middle class Van Nuys community of Los Angeles. She was the youngest of three daughters and, while both her elder sisters conformed to parental expectations and worked hard in school, little Diane (who now identifies as autistic) was an “alienated” rebel and a loner from the get-go. “Mom used to say she got the wrong baby from the hospital,” she says.
While she was clearly clever, she had “no interest whatsoever in anything academic” and her social awkwardness saw her bullied by “mean kids”. An early passion for pop meant she turned to music for solace, but when her father took her to guitar lessons, her teacher sent her home after two tutorials – pronouncing she had “no future in music”. In retrospect, she thinks he did her a favour as “not learning music in a conventional way” allowed her to write more originally. She tells me: “I don’t know what rules I’m breaking!”
Childhood friends tell the documentary team that at teenage parties, where other girls went in search of boys and booze, Diane would hole up in bathrooms with her guitar to enjoy the echoey acoustics. She wrote her first song at 11, was sexually molested at 12 and ran away from home – sleeping on lawns and in “not nice” hotels – at the age of 14. The first time her picture appeared in the paper was not for her musical talent, but because she was a missing teen. “I ran away because I’d flipped off a teacher in school and I didn’t want my parents to find out I had been kicked out,” she tells me. “I must have had an angel watching over me, because I stayed with these very scary characters for a couple weeks.” She shudders. “Anything could have happened, really, anything. I was pretty innocent in a weird way.”
Relieved after she returned home, Warren’s father invested more time in supporting her songwriting ambitions; he bought her a 12-string guitar and a metal shed to write in. Her song Because You Loved Me (recorded by Celine Dion in 1996) was written for him. Today, she tells me she “always believed in myself” and she spent her teens and 20s plugging away at her songwriting, even getting a job as a courier for the music industry so she could slip her own demo cassettes into record executives’ in-trays.
“I’m a born hustler,” she says today. “I will still DM [direct message] artists I don’t know if I think I’ve written a song that would work for them. It all comes from wanting my songs to be heard. I know they’re good!” But it took a solid decade of hustling for Warren to really start getting those songs heard. She had her big breakthrough with Solitaire, a hit for Laura Branigan in 1983, and things really took off when she wrote DeBarge’s jaunty Rhythm of the Night (1985) – she’s been flying since.
Warren always writes alone and has no time for the kind of songwriting by committee that sees a string of credits attached to most modern pop songs. “I’m not into anything by committee. I’m a committee of one,” she says. British pop star Lewis Capaldi spoke out about the stress he felt working with the big Californian songwriting teams a few years ago and Warren has huge sympathy for him. “I would tell him not to listen to those f---ers,” she says. “I would tell him to listen to his own heart. Or come to me. I would love to work with him.”
Frustration at Oscar losses
The documentary makes much of Warren’s sweary defiance. She’s often filmed flipping off the crew and today she waves a silver bracelet reading “Relentless as F---” at the laptop camera. She says she doesn’t care about the critics – “what other people think of me is none of my business” – so I wonder why winning the Oscar means so much to her. “I think it’s because it’s an award that gets voted for by your peers, and for songwriters there’s just one award. Plus I always watched the Oscars on TV with my mom and dad, and now I have these ‘sleepless sleepover’ parties [on the night of the nominations]… it’s just special,” she shrugs. She rolls her eyes over the way her evident frustration at losing has been caught on camera over the years. “You can see me saying ‘F---!’” she winces.
Written for a documentary about sexual assault, Warren’s song Til It Happens to You (2015), performed by Lady Gaga, was expected to be a shoe-in for an Oscar and she was hugely disappointed when it lost out to Sam Smith and Jimmy Napes’s Bond-theme Writing’s on the Wall. It was another personal song for Warren, who had experienced “a couple of creepy things” in the music industry.
“One time”, she says, “I was playing a song for somebody and I, you know, opened my eyes and he was, you know, jerking off.” She shakes her head. “I left. But stuff like that is kind of gross. But I know other people have had worse kind of things, been in horrible positions. I don’t know why the music industry hasn’t had its MeToo moment.”
Warren believes that Gaga’s performance of the song at the 2016 Awards ceremony – during which she was backed by 52 male and female survivors of sexual assault – was “still a beautiful thing” regardless of whether it won her a gold statue. Warren did, however, get an honorary Oscar in 2022, which she promptly waved at the heavens telling her mother she “finally got a man” and now keeps on her piano.
Even though she’s got stiff competition – mainly the number-one hit Golden from Netflix’s record-breaking smash animation KPop Demon Hunters – Warren would really like another statue for Dear Me this year. “Even though it’s such a personal song, that I wrote for myself, it seems to have a universal appeal. It shows how many people feel the same about themselves as me.” She smiles and offers a cheery parting shot. “If you don’t fit in, stand out!”.
On 7th September, we mark the seventieth birthday of the wonderful Diane Warren. One of the most successful songwriters ever, I do hope that she wins a long overdue Oscar. To mark her birthday, I have complied a mixtape of songs that she has written for other artists. Showing the depth and range of her songwriting genius. This is a salute to…
A true colossus.