Global pop star Arilena Ara is logged onto Zoom from her native Albania, chatting with superstar songsmith Diane Warren, the writer of her debut U.S. single, the classically Warren-esque power ballad “Weightless.” Ara is wearing an ironic “SPOILT BRAT” T-shirt, which has caught the eye of the always irrepressibly snarky Warren, but she laughingly recalls that at one of her first early in-person meetings with Warren, “I went with a shirt that said ‘ASSHOLE.’ And she’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s my jam!”
“Yeah: Sold!” quips Warren.
“Well, you did tell me that we’re a lot alike,” Ara tells Warren with a grin. “That was something that stuck with me.”
When Ara and Warren first met through Warren’s good friend, veteran music executive Larry Frazin, the two didn’t just connect over R-rated humor and sassy fashion. Warren quickly recognized that, like Warren herself, Ara “had that fire” and was quite the total opposite of a spoiled brat — that Ara was a “hard worker… just hungry, wanting to make shit happen.” And Warren appreciated Ara’s “unique sound.” But then, when Ara sang “Weightless” — after Warren instructed her to “go in the studio and do whatever you want and just kill this” — it was Ara’s X Factor Albania-winning power-vocals that impressed the legendary songwriter the most.
When Warren — a Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee who is tied for having written the most No. 1 songs as a sole writer in Billboard history, and whose compositions have been recorded by greats like Celine Dion, Cher, Toni Braxton, Aerosmith, LeAnn Rimes, Heart, and Christina Aguilera — heard Ara belt “Weightless,” she immediately thought, “‘Holy shit, this girl can fucking sing!’ I write a lot of songs, and sometimes I just don’t know who they’re for. And then I hear somebody sing and I’m like, ‘Oh my God. That’s your song.’ And that’s what happened with this. And it was better than I thought it would be, too. I knew that [Ara] would sing it great, but when I heard it I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is just Celine-level — that great of a performance.”
Ara was only 14 when she won X Factor Albania in 2013, but she freely admits that auditioning for Warren in her mid-twenties was an “absolutely, absolutely” more daunting challenge. “I can’t even compare it. [Competing on reality TV] is nothing like Diane. It’s Diane, come on! That was a big test,” Ara laughs. “When I was 14 years old, I had nothing to lose. … But in this case, I had to impress her. I knew that she’d worked with so many amazing singers — like, my favorite singers of all time. And I come from Albania, and I am trying to make a single with Diane! … And if she was going to say, ‘OK, it’s good, it’s nice, you have a nice voice,’ I knew that that wasn’t going to be enough. … Diane is honest in the studio. If she likes something, she will say it. And if she doesn’t, she’ll be like, ‘Just get the hell out of my studio.’”
“I wouldn’t say it like that, but yeah, I’m pretty honest,” chuckles Warren. “Obviously I would say, ‘Please get the fuck out.’”
But that, of course, didn’t happen. “She wanted to hear [me sing] the song three times, and then she’s like, ‘Oh my God, this is fucking great,’” Ara recalls proudly.
Ara was prepared for this pivotal career moment because, as Warren notes, she’d already “done her 10,000 hours.” And as Ara notes, she’d been “well-trained to handle fame and success and being onstage.” While “Weightless” is Ara’s official American debut, she’s been a major star in Europe for over a decade, where she has judged The X Factor Albania and The Voice Albania; received Song of the Year and Best Artist awards in 10 different countries; and charted multiple top 10 hits, including two number-ones. She’s such a celebrity in Albania, in fact, that she rarely ventures out, at least not without a pair of incognito sunglasses, because she admittedly “doesn’t feel comfortable” with the attention and “just can’t do it anymore.”
But Ara stresses, “Since I love what I do so much, it’s not like I have any regrets.” So, the downsides of European fame haven’t deterred her from trying to finally break America, which has been her dream since childhood. “I just wanted to break borders and not just be [successful] in Europe. I wanted to be worldwide, for some reason,” Ara muses. “Music is not just a passion to me. It’s my whole life. It’s my whole personality. It’s who I am. It’s the only thing that I can actually do, in the best way possible. I’ve been my entire life, since I was a little kid, onstage. I haven’t actually been a normal teenager, living just like everybody else. … So, yeah, I am in my twenties, but I feel like I’ve lived, I don’t know, too many years.”
Ara was actually trying to launch her Stateside career right the before COVID-19 pandemic, when she traveled to America to work on the song she was supposed to perform while representing Albania in the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest. But then, for the first and only time in Eurovision’s 69-year history, the competition was canceled due to COVID concerns, and everything got put on hold. But Ara now believes it was “destiny” that she waited to debut in the States with Warren’s help: “I think now is the right moment. I’ve been preparing myself to do this. It’s been like five years working on this project.”
“My theory is if you’re a star anywhere, you could be a star everywhere,” asserts Diane. “You could look at [starting from scratch in America] as challenging, too. It’s like building something new.”
Going with a ballad for her debut U.S. single is an interesting choice (although a “Weightless” dance remix is dropping in August), but Ara says ballads are her “specialty,” and of course Warren, while contentedly single in her personal life, specializes in love songs. “People do all kinds of things to [my ballads] — get married, get divorced, have sex, have kids. Their funeral songs, too,” says Warren. And “Weightless” is an iconic Diane ballad “about being in love — not that I know anything about that! I love my cat,” Warren shrugs.
Warren adds, with a chuckle, that she once thought, “‘Oh, this would be a great song when all those people went [to space] with Jeff Bezos.’ And then I’m going, ‘Ohhhh, maybe it’s good that it wasn’t used…’” [Side note: When it is semi-jokingly suggested that Warren pen a song for Katy Perry to help get Perry’s career back on track, Warren answers, “I don't know if she'd want me to. But I'd do it.”]
photo courtesy of Falcon Publicity
In all seriousness, “Weightless” allowed Ara to tap into “a lot of mixed emotions, raw emotions.” She explains: “Even when I don’t write, I try to be connected with the song and to feel every word, every note, and just be totally in love in that moment with the song and to feel it personally. And it was personal. … It was going to be my first single for the U.S., and doing that with Diane meant the world to me, to be honest, that she believed in me. And she did say that: ‘I believe in you.’ It’s not easy coming from Albania, based here with my career, trying to make it to the States. And to have Diane in front of you and just believe in you and say, ‘You can make it and I’m going to help you do that’… wow.”
Several times during our Zoom conversation, Warren stresses that Ara can’t stay in Albania if she wants to capitalize on the momentum of “Weightless,” which so far has garnered a positive reception in America. “People in my world that have heard it just say, ‘What a fucking great song! Who is this?’ And that this song should be the biggest hit. I’m just hoping that it [breaks through] here,” says Warren. “That being said, you do have to be here. You do have to get here. That’s something that I think is super-important. You have to be here. You have to have boots on the ground.”
“Well, Diane promised me after we released ‘Weightless,’ she’s going to write an EP for me. She did promise me that! And that’s the reason why I’m coming to L.A. [very soon] to make this happen,” Ara declares.
“I mainly will give you songs [as opposed to co-writing], to be honest,” Warren tells Ara in her usual blunt manner, as our international Zoom summit comes to an end. “So, if you’re open to that…”
“Diane knows my potential,” Ara responds, smiling, giving the thumbs-up. “So, she can do whatever she wants. And I’ll take it.”
