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 t