There's a lot that may have seemed incongruous about the scene in a recording studio inside the songwriter Diane Warren's Hollywood office on a recent rainy afternoon, where the rapper Big Sean was holed up in a booth recording vocals for a new track. Warren is best known for big, dramatic power ballads from the '80s and '90s like Toni Braxton's "Un-Break My Heart," Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," and Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time." Hers are songs that remind you of the glory and pain of love, whereas Sean's take on past relationships is perhaps best summed up by a line from his hit "I Don't Fuck With You": "Bitch, I don't give a fuck about you or anything that you do."
But there he was, singing — crooning, almost — on a track called "Am I Missing Something?" a sweet, down-tempo R&B ballad about a party guy realizing that he's lonely, that maybe what he's really missing is love. And when Warren's team of engineers played it back for him, he liked what he heard.
"It's crazy," he said, shaking his head. "It's good. It's so tight."
"It sounds fucking great, man," said Warren. They high-fived. Warren and Sean met in December, when they both participated in a pre-Grammys Billboard magazine roundtable. Warren is nominated for a Grammy for Best Song for Visual Media for a song she wrote with Lady Gaga, "Til It Happens to You," which is featured in the campus rape documentary The Hunting Ground; "Til It Happens to You" has also been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Big Sean is up for a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration for "One Man Can Change the World," which he recorded with Kanye West and John Legend.
"I was like, 'Oh shit, Diane Warren!'" Sean said. At the roundtable, Warren had asked him if he sang, and when he said yes, she told him she had a song for him. Warren has written thousands of songs, but with her near-perfect recall of everything she's ever written, she immediately knew which of her songs would be perfect for Sean to record. ("I think I have, like, a sixth sense. I'm like the song whisperer.")
If it hadn't been for the song with Gaga, Warren wouldn't have been nominated for a Grammy, and if she hadn't been nominated for a Grammy, she wouldn't have been at the roundtable and met Big Sean. And if it hadn't been for a documentary about campus rape that needed a song, Warren wouldn't have been nominated for an Oscar, and she also wouldn't have been getting recognition for a kind of song — powerfully topical, culturally relevant — that she's rarely done before. It's been years since Warren, who is 59, has had the kind of influence she did in the '80s and '90s, when most of the gold and platinum records that line the hallway of the office of Realsongs, the music publishing company she started in 1985, were recorded.
Warren holding her Grammy in 2007.
Courtesy Diane Warren
In her heyday, "Diane Warren song" became shorthand for a very specific type of big, dramatic power ballad, the kind you might want to hear at your prom or your wedding, or to belt out in front of strangers at a karaoke bar — but not one that's necessarily culturally significant. And so, in this light, recording with Big Sean and being up for an Academy Award — an honor, much to her chagrin, that she's never won — for a song written for a campus rape documentary (and not, say, the movie Pearl Harbor) actually aren't that surprising. Because if Warren's career were one of her songs, she'd be in the bridge right now, the section that emphasizes the contrast between the verses and choruses, and which brings us back to the huge chorus at the end. "I'm so into the next," she said.
Sean went back in the booth to work on the end of the song, where he was freestyling a verse. "Someone like him is authentic," said Warren. "I just had a feeling." But as she listened to Sean sing his freestyled verse, Warren was getting agitated.
She turned to me and said, "He's rhyming 'much' with 'much.'" Sean did another take. "He shouldn't rhyme 'much' with 'much,'" she said under her breath. She finally blurted out, loud enough for her engineers to hear, "He's rhyming 'much' with 'much.'"
"He's still working it out," said Warren's engineer A.C. Burrell as Sean started on another take from the booth, where he couldn't hear the discussion in the studio.
"Oh, OK," said Warren. She laughed nervously. "I'm, like, trying to teach him how to rap. Ha-ha-ha." She was quiet for a second, but when the "much/much" rhyme came up again, she couldn't help herself. "Maybe 'enough'? Suggest 'enough' for the second line. Tell him 'enough.'"
"Just wait," said Burrell, who has a warm British accent. He had had a baby daughter six days earlier and was operating on little sleep, but never raised his voice. "Let him figure it out."
Sean did it again, tripping over the line with the second "much."
"OK, tell him," said Burrell, turning on the studio mic.
"Try 'enough,'" Warren said loudly.
"Where?" said Sean.
"In the line where you repeat 'much'…'enough' makes more sense."
"Oh yeah yeah yeah. You're right."
"I teach rap on the side," Warren said. Everyone chuckled. Sean did the verse again.
"That's much better," said Sean's voice from the booth.
"Does he want to write that down?" asked Warren.
"Will you let the rapper rap?" said Burrell. Sean did the verse again, and this time, everyone in the room — Warren, Sean's friend and music video director Lawrence Lamont, his recording engineer Max Jaeger, Burrell and Warren's other three recording engineers/producers, Warren's assistant Bahareh Batmang (whom everyone calls Batman), and Warren's friend, actress Kathrine Narducci, who was in town from New York — nodded and grinned.
Sean emerged from the booth to applause. He seemed sheepishly surprised. "I thought you were gonna be out here like, 'Eh, it doesn't really need the verse.'" Everyone assured him that the verse sounded great.
"I never worked with someone where I didn't write the songs," said Sean. "It's different. It's cool."
"It's funny how things happen," said Warren.
Warren, Lady Gaga, and The Hunting Ground director Kirby Dick at a screening of the documentary in early January.
Todd Williamson / Getty Images
A few weeks earlier, Warren was sitting on a stage in an auditorium in the New York Times Building in Midtown Manhattan with Lady Gaga and Hunting Ground director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, for a TimesTalk discussion about the film and the song. Warren, who wears her black hair short with spiky bangs coming down to her eyes, was wearing jeans, a black leather jacket, and sparkly sneakers; Gaga was in a flowy ivory dress and platform sandals, her platinum hair pulled back.
"Me and Diane wanted to open the door to any person that went through any type of experience, that it was OK to feel that way and that you don't have to maybe defend yourself so much," said Gaga. "Because until it happens to you, they don't know how it feels."
"Gaga's performance starts out vulnerable, and then you're getting pissed," said Warren. Warren had originally wanted the song to end on that same vulnerable note it started on, but Gaga wasn't having it. "You wanted to make it epic," said Warren.
"I'm going, no, I'm not going out like that," said Gaga. "I'm not going out on this sad note."
Hunting Ground music supervisor Bonnie Greenberg, who's known Warren for years, contacted her when Dick and Ziering were looking for a song for the closing credits of the movie. "She came to me, and I was like, oh, I've got to do this," Warren told me. "I don't overthink it. It's almost like my brain is like a computer. I remember sitting down and coming up with the chorus. And the power of 'til it happens to you, you don't know how it feels.' That was so powerful, because it's so simple. And then it was just like, when you're in that, you're going through that, it's like, fuck you, go fuck yourself. Shut up. There's a line in there that's my favorite line — it's 'until you walk where I walk it's just all talk.' It's the essence of that song. So don't fucking tell me it's gonna get better. Just don't tell me."
Warren was molested by a friend's father when she was 12 — something she didn't reveal publicly until she started talking about the song — and Gaga was raped by an ex-boyfriend when she was 19, which she discussed for the first time on The Howard Stern Show in December 2014. "It's really interesting hearing you talk and hearing the depth of understanding that the two of you have," Dick said at the TimesTalk. "We've never really worked with an artist who had this kind of deep understanding."
It wasn't a foregone conclusion that Gaga was going to record the song. "I knew she'd talked about her experience on Howard Stern, so it was out in the open," Warren said. She called Gaga and played her the song with Warren's vocals. "She was, like, crying. She was sobbing on the phone." Warren got on a plane to New York the next day, and they went into the studio. (In the last few weeks, Warren has been back in the studio with Gaga, working on songs for her new album. "We did a couple of really great songs," she said. "I can't wait ’til they're out.")
Warren at the 2015 Academy Awards.
George Pimentel / Getty Images
Even though it hasn't been released as a single by Gaga's label, Interscope, or pushed on radio (and has therefore failed to crack the Billboard Hot 100), the song has elevated Warren to a new level of cultural relevance. It's hard to imagine the New York Times convening a panel about Warren's song "Because You Loved Me" and the movie in which it was featured, Up Close and Personal. "Til It Happens to You" has also raised her visibility; usually content to stay behind the scenes, she's very much been the public face of this song, alongside Gaga. "I'm starting to get these messages on Twitter and Facebook, people I grew up with, going, 'I never told anybody this but your song gave me strength,'" she told me. "I got tons of them, from people I didn't know. I've had a lot of records that have done really well, but nothing like this."
Warren repeatedly expressed frustration with the way the song has been promoted — or rather, not been promoted. Almost all of the publicity the song has gotten has been completely organic. The video, directed by Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke, a longtime friend of Warren's, has more than 24 million views on YouTube, and perhaps unexpectedly for a song from a documentary about rape survivors, the track has become a dance hit. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard Dance/Club chart for the week of Jan. 23, thanks to around 30 remixes by DJs like Tracy Young and Ryan Carrozza — which were done completely independently of Gaga or Warren or Interscope — putting Gaga at the top of the charts for the first time since 2013. The song has also started making its way onto radio — but not because Interscope has been pushing it. "The label's not doing anything," Warren said. "I think the song is like, you can't hold it back. It's totally viral."
For Warren, though, the Oscar is the holy grail. On New Year's Eve, she tweeted: "2015, great to know U, 2016, can't wait to meet U!!! #fingerscrossed #Oscars #TilItHappensToYou #2016isgonnafuckingrock."
Our conversation turned to Melissa Leo's 2011 Oscars campaign, for which she took out her own ads asking voters to consider her. (Leo won.) "People gave her shit for that," said Warren. "Why can't you promote yourself? I try to do it in a funny way. I'm posting Gaga doing my song. What's wrong with that? It's a beautiful thing. I don't want it to be too blatant — but where is the line? You should be proud of your work. Why not be proud of your work?"
Last year, Warren was nominated for "Grateful," a Rita Ora song that was on the soundtrack for Beyond the Lights, which lost to John Legend and Common's "Glory" from the movie Selma. (Warren was also critical of the promotion for "Grateful," grumbling that Ora and her label did little to push the song.) Warren remembers being in the audience and watching Gaga perform a song from The Sound of Music. "And I was like, ohh, OK, next year. I see it in my mind, just her sitting at the piano with a string orchestra. No drums, nothing. Just stripped the fuck down."
The field is not without its rivalries and passions, especially around awards season. In January, after the Oscar nominations were announced, songwriter and producer Linda Perry — whose song "Hands of Love," performed by Miley Cyrus, from the movie Freeheld, was not nominated — ranted about Warren and Gaga's collaboration. In a series of now-deleted tweets, Perry alleged that Gaga's contribution to the song amounted to one line, that the only reason Warren wanted Gaga to record the song was because she knew it would get more publicity that way, and that the only reason Gaga wanted to record it was because she knew Warren would be nominated for an Oscar. (Gaga has never pretended to have contributed more than the line and some of the arrangement; in December she told the Los Angeles Times, "It was already kind of a finished piece when I came in to work on it with Diane.")
Warren responded on Twitter the next day and elected not to take the bait. A couple hours later, after deleting the tweets, Perry tweeted: "My sincere apologies. I made a mistake to comment. I wasn't in the room when the #TIHTY was being written. More importantly, I wish the focus to remain on the great importance of the song and the message of the film." (Neither Perry nor Warren responded to requests for comment about the incident.)
Warren has won pretty much every other award there is to get, but the lack of an Oscar seems to have become a kind of existential shortcoming, a reckoning of her career that few other people in the world are keeping track of. Even she couldn't quite articulate why she wants it so badly, beyond pointing out the evident slight. "Since I've lost seven times, it'd be cool," she said. "They only give out one Oscar for song every year and they give lots of Grammys. It's a cool thing, like when you're a kid, to get an Academy Award. It's not about awards — but it would be cool."
On the day the nominations were announced, Warren was excited and relieved — she hadn't slept much the past couple of days. "Today was so cool," she said. "A lot of songs get released and a lot of songs don't get nominated, and this one did." If she wins, I asked, what would be next for her? "To write more songs? To have more songs in movies? It's like, winning this stuff isn't what makes me do it, but it's fucking cool. It'd be fucking cool to win it. This is the coolest part. I've won one Grammy, and then if I have an Oscar — you know how they have an EGOT? I'd be an OG." She laughed. "I'm an OG, right? An Oscar and a Grammy."
Emily Berl for BuzzFeed News
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