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”.