Largely Unseen, but Not Unsung

It’s midafternoon as songwriter Diane Warren sits at an electronic keyboard in a cramped office in Hollywood, a room so cluttered with stacks of demo tapes, microphone stands, notebooks, pencils, guitars and other tools of the trade that she refers to it as “the Cave.”

A shy woman with short, cropped hair and a quick, nervous smile, Warren is possibly the most successful songwriter of the ‘90s, thanks to such hits as “Un-Break My Heart” for Toni Braxton, “Because You Loved Me” for Celine Dion, “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” for Aerosmith and “How Do I Live” for both LeAnn Rimes and Trisha Yearwood.

She wrote most of her hits in this room--and she seems desperate for another one this afternoon.

Warren has been here since 8:30 a.m., stopping on the way in from her West Hollywood home only to pick up a cup of iced mocha with an extra shot of espresso.

To save time, she had lunch brought in--a vegetarian order big enough to also cover dinner because she’s planning to be here until 9, when she’ll head home and think some more about the new song before going to bed around 11. She then plans to get up the next morning and rush back to this good-luck office to resume work on the new tune.

Some urgent, on-deadline song for a big-budget movie?

“No, no,” Warren, 42, says with a self-conscious giggle. “This is the way it is for me. It’s here . . . in the Cave. Twelve hours a day, six days a week. People are always telling me, ‘You need a social life,’ but I’ve never had much of a life. There are times I wish I [could] relax a little more, but I don’t know how. . . .”

She pauses then adds, “Well, that’s not true. I did take some time off last year. I went to [Miami’s] South Beach for two days.”

In many ways, Warren, whose music is distinguished by sweeping, seductive melodies, is a throwback to the Tin Pan Alley era, when writers wrote songs and singers then sang them.

The pictures on the sheet music may have been of Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby, but the words and music were by Cole Porter or Irving Berlin.

Those old ways changed in the ‘60s after the Beatles and Bob Dylan made everyone in rock want to write and sing their own songs. Even writers who had the kind of mainstream touch that would have made them successes in the Tin Pan Alley era, such as Carole King, Paul Simon and Neil Diamond, set their sights on recording careers.

Warren, who began pitching her songs to Hollywood publishers while she was still a student at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, has had many opportunities to join the world of singers, and has even been offered her own record label.

But she refuses to do anything that would take away from her writing--a preoccupation that amazes, and sometimes troubles, her close friends.

Even when she’s out of the Cave, she’s often thinking about music. If she gets an idea in the car, she’ll call home on her cell phone and sing it into the answering machine. She keeps notebooks handy around the house, and she usually begins Sundays--her day off--fiddling around with some new composition rather than simply enjoying the view from her Malibu condo retreat.

Work . . . work . . . work.

In her pursuit of another hit song, Warren has sacrificed everything from relationships (the last one broke up six years ago) to the kind of name recognition most pop artists crave.

“The thrill is in sitting down with a blank piece of paper and coming up with ideas and then seeing someone in the car next to you at a stoplight listening to your song on the radio,” she says.

Sure it happens, she adds.

“I’ll honk at the stoplight and yell, ‘I wrote that.’ I’ve done that a bunch of times. Mostly people go, ‘Yeah, sure,’ but sometimes people actually believe me.”

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Warren may not be recognized when she pulls up at intersections, but the San Fernando Valley native is paid handsomely for her anonymity.

Being the songwriter of a worldwide hit can easily mean $1 million in record royalties and performance fees. A blockbuster could double or triple that sum--and Warren has had lots of blockbusters, including “Un-Break My Heart,” one of the most stylish pop tunes in years.

Consider: Every time someone buys a copy of Braxton’s 1996 recording of the song, Warren receives 7.1 cents, the songwriting royalty set by U.S. copyright statutes. Each time you hear the song on the radio or on television or in a club or at a football game, she’s also adding to her income.

In the case of “Un-Break My Heart,” she has earned nearly $1.2 million in the U.S. alone for the first 18 months of the song’s life. Broken down, that’s an estimated $504,000 in recording royalties (based on 4.8 million album sales and 2.3 million singles sales) and $695,000 in radio, TV and live performance fees. With foreign sales and airplay, that total could easily reach $2.5 million to $3 million.

If Warren decides to follow in the footsteps of the Rolling Stones (“Start Me Up”) or Bob Seger (“Like a Rock”) and sell one of her songs for a TV commercial (something she is cautiously exploring), she could collect another $150,000 to $500,000 in fees and residuals, according to industry estimates.

All those figures add up--rapidly, once you’ve got a body of work like Warren’s. That’s why publishing is a $6-billion-a-year business worldwide, according to the National Music Publishers Assn.

Donald S. Passman, a Los Angeles attorney and author of the book “All You Need to Know About the Music Business,” stresses the importance of publishing.

“One of the most important things a songwriter can do is make sure he or she understands publishing--before signing all your money away,” he says. “There can be millions of dollars at stake.”

The wisest career move Warren ever made, she says, was opening her own publishing company, Realsongs, in 1988, which meant she would receive 100% of songwriting royalties rather than share up to 50% with a publisher. It was a risky move because she wasn’t a household name in the music industry at the time. But she had faith in her abilities.

Now Realsongs, which is worth tens of millions of dollars, is believed to be the most successful female-owned business in the music industry.

Not that all that success has calmed Warren.

In a rare break from songwriting, Warren made an unusual public appearance Dec. 1 before some of Nashville’s country music elite.

Tony Brown, president of MCA Nashville Records, was looking for someone to headline a benefit concert for Park Center, a homeless haven in Nashville, when Warren called a few weeks ago to pitch some of her songs. Country artists have begun to turn increasingly to Warren’s songs, and she thought there were some that Brown might be especially interested in. Besides the success of Rimes and Yearwood with “How Do I Live,” Faith Hill and Tim McGraw had a Top 5 country single this year with Warren’s “Just to Hear You Say That You Love Me.”

She resisted his offer to perform, explaining she was shy and awkward on stage, but he persuaded her by saying he’d recruit others to perform with her, including some of the country stars who’ve sung her tunes. Sensing an opportunity to showcase her material and bond with Nashville writers and producers, she finally accepted.

Still, she was a bundle of nerves before the show at the Bluebird Cafe, pacing in her bus in the parking lot behind the intimate club. “I’m scared [expletive],” she said anxiously when approached by a reporter. “I should be home behind my piano. That’s really the only place I’m comfortable.”

Warren was equally ill at ease on stage, singing only one song as she turned most of the evening over to other singers. One highlight was Wynonna’s beautiful version of Warren’s “You Were Loved,” which Wynonna also sings on the new “Touched by an Angel” TV soundtrack album. During the song, Wynonna held her 2-year-old, Grace, in her arms.

After a traumatic day like this, you’d think Warren might treat herself to a day off.

Instead, she and Dorene Dorian, Realsongs’ general manager, got up at 5:30 a.m. for a flight that got them to Los Angeles International Airport at 10. A half-hour later, Warren was back in the Cave, accompanied by her parrot, Butt-Wings.

“I have been going to therapy for four years and I have my tortured moments . . . but not tortured in the sense of a tortured artist,” she says about her relentless drive. “I think everyone has that conflict of ‘Am I good enough? . . . Is it all going to end? Are they going to find out I’m a fraud?’ . . . There’s this confidence and self-doubt at the same time, which is probably good because it may keep me hungry, keeps me pushing and trying to get better.”

Girls have been known to throw their telephone numbers and bras on stage at concerts by sex-symbol performers. Teenage Diane Eve Warren used to throw her number on stage, but it was attached to demo tapes. She was hoping one of the musicians would listen and be impressed by her songs.

That same zealous spirit caused her to get fired from her first job after two weeks. The boss of the messenger service, which catered to the music industry, didn’t like the fact that Warren, in her early 20s at the time, was passing out her tapes to clients along with the deliveries.

If you get the feeling that Warren has always been obsessed with a songwriting career, you’re not far off.

She was born in Van Nuys on Sept. 7, 1956, the year Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” entered the pop charts. And she didn’t waste any time getting caught up in music.

The youngster’s two older sisters were both music fans, and she remembers hearing Buddy Holly and Elvis when she was a baby. She was 8 when she bought her first album, “Meet the Beatles,” and she still recalls the thrill of seeing the Fab Four with her sisters at Dodger Stadium and the Hollywood Bowl.

But Warren was never interested in being on stage herself. She was just fascinated by the songwriters. And her face brightens when she starts rattling off the names: Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Stevie Wonder. . . .

She listened to the songs, she studied them and she practiced writing her own.

By her early teens, Warren had so impressed her father, an insurance salesman, with her seriousness about music that he began taking her to appointments with dozens of Los Angeles music publishers. No one showed interest.

It hurt at the time, but Warren now prides herself on her resilience. She enjoys telling stories on herself.

“Do you want to know about the first money I made in music?” she asks, barely waiting for an answer. “I was 14 and my friend [knew someone who] owned this restaurant in Marina del Rey, and she thought I should go there and sing my songs and maybe someone would discover me. After the first song, the owner gives me $25 and says I was interrupting the people’s dinner.”

To please her family after high school, Warren attended Pierce College in Woodland Hills for two years and then spent another two years at Cal State Northridge, but she waves her hand when asked about her major.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I just took classes. I spent a lot of time in the practice rooms, just like I do now.”

Warren was in her mid-20s when she finally got a break. Through a friend, she landed a position as a staff writer with Jack White, a producer who worked with singer Laura Branigan. White gave her a copy of a French song one day and asked her to come up with some English lyrics.

The next morning she turned in “Solitaire,” which became a Top 10 hit for Branigan in 1983.

Warren didn’t feel fulfilled because she had only written the lyrics. The song she considers her real chart debut was “Rhythm of the Night,” a No. 3 hit in 1985 for the group DeBarge.

By this time Warren had already severed ties with White through a lawsuit that ended in a settlement. Her first instinct was to sign with another publisher, but the major firms balked because they were afraid of being brought into the lawsuit. So, on an attorney’s advice, Warren started Realsongs.

The company was still in its infancy when Warren found a kindred soul in Dorian, a New Yorker who had some experience in the music business, but whose main credentials may have been a work ethic and passion for music as fierce as Warren’s.

When Dorian started, it was just the two of them in a pair of rooms on the eighth floor of the Hollywood building. Realsongs has now expanded to 18 offices and a staff of 12. It’s a self-contained operation with everything from tape duplication services to listening rooms.

Still, everything revolves around the Cave.

Warren was named songwriter of the year for 1990 by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, thanks to hits such as Taylor Dayne’s “Love Will Lead You Back” and Milli Vanilli’s “Blame It on the Rain.” (About the latter, she says, “I don’t know who was singing, but I think they did a fabulous job, and I still like the song.”)

She was also named ASCAP’s writer of the year in 1991, 1992 and 1997, which, along with her workaholic pace, led many in the industry to dub her the hit-making machine.

Despite the early success, Warren received little critical or media attention because the songs were often served up in big, blustery arrangements by such unhip singers as Michael Bolton and Celine Dion. There was also a somewhat generic feel to many of them. They were solidly crafted, but many were anonymous, some music insiders say.

But there has been an increasing sense of character and edge in the music, especially with “Un-Break My Heart.”

“She has stepped up a level,” says a rival publishing executive who asked not to be identified. “She certainly had the hits, but there was a question of how long some of those songs were going to last. When we started hearing things like ‘Un-Break My Heart’ and ‘How Do I Live,’ the guessing stopped. She’s for real.”

Oscar and Grammy voters have certainly been paying attention to Warren’s work. She received best-song Oscar nominations two years in a row for “Because You Loved Me” from “Up Close and Personal” and “How Do I Live” from “Con Air,” as well as back-to-back best song Grammy nominations for the same songs.

But her most impressive feat may be the string of movie hits. Her songs have now been featured in nearly 50 films.

“Diane has mastered the art of movie songwriting . . . seeing the rough cut of a movie or reading a script and then going off and writing a song that captures the emotional essence of that movie,” says Glen Brunman, executive vice president of Sony Music Soundtrax, which has used Warren songs in several films, including “Up Close and Personal” and “Armageddon.”

“It’s a very, very difficult thing to do. There are a lot of great songwriters, but not a lot of great songwriters who can write a song for a movie and make it work.”

In the Cave, Warren has keyboards set up so she can look out onto Sunset Boulevard while she writes. The walls are filled with mementos, from early trade ads promoting her songs to copies of some Top 100 charts showing her first hits.

She has found a magic here, and she guards it like a sanctuary, rarely letting outsiders in. There are stacks of tapes on every available tabletop or piece of equipment, many piled at odd, delicate angles like the Tower of Pisa, making it difficult to weave one’s way to the keyboards. She jokes that the original dust is still on the torn window shade.

Music insiders often kid Warren and Dorian about staying in this old building rather than moving to a newer place on the Strip or the music biz centers of Santa Monica or Burbank. But she doesn’t want to leave the Cave.

She estimates she has written nearly 1,000 songs in this room, and she has stories about almost all of them, including some favorites that have never been hits.

Asked about “Un-Break My Heart,” she says, “I had this thought, ‘un-break my heart.’ I had never heard that said that way. That’s the trick, . . . finding something that has been said a million times before, but say it in a slightly different way.

“So, I started writing it with this Spanishy feel. I like to work on one song at a time and I think I started on it in the morning. I came up with the title and started messing around with it on the keyboard. I got the chorus really, really quick, . . . 15, 20 minutes, then started figuring out the verse. It probably took about four days to write it. Didn’t have any idea who should sing it, but I thought it was a great song.”

Before she even recorded a demo tape of the song, Warren played it for Clive Davis, the legendary president of Arista Records who is known for his ability to match material and singer.

“He said Toni Braxton instantly,” Warren recalls. “And it was a great choice. She has this sultry, sexy, dark, cool thing in her voice. I demoed the song and got it to Toni and was there the whole time she was recording it with [Grammy-winning producer] David Foster.”

“You know how people are always saying [no one] writes songs like they used to? Well, Diane is someone who does,” Davis says. “She is able to combine tremendous feel for melody with lyrics that deal with genuine emotions, and she is able to do it time after time.”

Davis--always needing songs for such Arista artists as Braxton, Whitney Houston, Monica and Deborah Cox--views Warren as such a strong source of hits that he regularly meets with her to hear her new material on his monthly visits to Los Angeles.

And what about the other three weeks each month?

“She calls me and sings the new songs on the phone.”

Just as there is something vulnerable about Warren’s best songs, there is something tender and endearing about her insecurity.

Sitting in a comfortable guest lounge in her suite of offices, Warren is an eager talker who speaks rapidly and with a nervous edge, often following her own comments with questions. “Don’t you find that to be true?” . . . “Isn’t that the way it is?” . . . “Don’t you think?”

She seems curious when it’s pointed out how unusual her single-minded devotion to songwriting is. What about singing?

“I don’t want to do anything but this,” she says. “I know some people want to be artists and want a record company. Babyface tries to do it all and that may work for him, but that’s not me.”

Warren’s not so quick to answer when the questions turn to her personal life and the issue of balance.

She pauses.

“Friends are always giving me advice,” she says softly. “[Entertainment mogul David] Geffen will say, ‘Get a life. What’s another No. 1 record?’ . . . Well, I think my love is really for music. . . . I’ve never loved any human being like I love my music. . . . I don’t miss [a fuller life]. It’s like I get to live in my songs. . . . When it’s right and I find someone, I will have another [relationship].”

Dorian is trying to find more balance in her own life. As much a workaholic as Warren, she has gone through two divorces. But she says she is learning to schedule her time so she has occasional evenings free.

“And you know what?” she says. “I see Diane definitely making small attempts at that balance herself. She takes yoga now every week on a Thursday. That’s a breakthrough for her. It would have been unheard of two years ago. She’s also got a couple of assistants. She’s not trying to do everything herself. . . .

“But I’m not sure if she’ll ever lose her drive. The thing that is hard to believe is that Diane is the same person she was when I met her. She’s sweet, she’s funny, she’s insecure, but she’s unbelievably strong and competitive, even ruthless when it comes to her music. She won’t let you mess around with her music.

“To me, that comes from a tremendous amount of rejection . . . a tremendous amount. I don’t fully understand it. I remember when I used to go on a job interview and get turned down. I would say, ‘OK, I’ll try somewhere else tomorrow.’ But these were her songs that were rejected when she was at a very young age. It was like they were rejecting her and it hurt.”

Later, in the Cave, Warren asks if a visitor would like to hear the song she is working on. She hasn’t got it on tape yet, so she sings it--and she’s so nervous that she keeps her head down.

Her voice isn’t in the class of Braxton or Dion, but its intimacy underscores the sense of struggle in the song, a statement of resilience and optimism--maybe even the tale of a woman who overcomes the rejection of all those early years.

At the end, she sits at the keyboard.

Without lifting her head, she asks, “Do you like it? . . . Do you think it could be a hit?”

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Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. Michael McCall, a freelance writer in Nashville, contributed to this story.