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.”

In 2022, superstar songwriter Diane Warren was presented with an Academy Honorary Award “for her genius, generosity, and passionate commitment to the power of song in film.” But that prestigious honor hardly diminished her desire to take home a trophy for Best Original Song. “I still want the competitive one!” she tells Gold Derby. “My Oscar, he’s very lonely. He sits there by himself. He wants a boyfriend. He needs a friend.”

As the composer of 33 top 10 hits (nine of which topped the Billboard Hot 100); a Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee; and the recipient of a Grammy, an Emmy, an Ivor Novello Award, two Golden Globes, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Warren clearly has nothing to prove. But she’s never been shy about the fact that she really wants to win that elusive Oscar, which she calls the “gold standard” of all awards and “the coolest thing in the world.”

And in her usual blunt manner, Warren says anyone who claims not to care about the Academy Awards are “so full of shit.” As seen in her new and very aptly titled documentary Relentless, she stays up all night with her friends, always wearing her “lucky sweater,” every awards season, to watch the crack-of-dawn Oscar nominees announcement. And she whoops and cheers every time she makes the ballot.

And now Warren has made the Academy’s ballot for the 16th time, for “The Journey” from Tyler Perry’s historical war drama The Six Triple Eight. “It’s sweet 16. Not that I’m that sweet,” she quips. Warren, who holds the dubious distinction of being the most-nominated woman in Oscar history to have never actually won, has grudgingly come to embrace her underdog status, even amusingly rocking a Susan Lucci T-shirt one of the times that she lost. And she’s aware that, much like Lucci and the Daytime Emmys, her Academy snubs have practically made her cause célèbre in the industry.

“I’m not into sports, really. I don’t know anything about sports. But I guess I’m almost like the losing team that’s lost for decades, that they keep sending back and people keep rooting for you,” Warren chuckles. “But this year, there’s so many people rooting for me. And I’ve never felt that with any song.”

Warren feels the 16th time may be the charm, because the circumstances behind “The Journey,” which she declares “one of my best songs I ever wrote just for a movie,” are so unique. “I’ve never done anything like this. My friend Keri Selig is one of the producers on the movie. I ran into her at this event and she said, ‘I want to tell you about the movie I’m working on.’ And she showed me the sizzle reel for The Six Triple Eight, and I was like, ‘Wow, how is the story not known?’ And then she walked me through it, every scene. So, in my mind, I saw the movie. That’s never happened before; usually it’s reading a script or seeing a rough. This was in my head… and the next day, sitting down and playing those chords on the piano, that whole chorus just kind of wrote itself.”

Warren also feels teaming with R&B star H.E.R., who sings “The Journey,” was meant to be. “It’s such a cool story,” she gushes. “I met her when she was 14 or 15, and she blew me away — that she was that fucking good at that fucking age, that she played everything, that she sang, that she produced, that she wrote. Who does that?” The two reunited years later, at the 2021 Oscars. “She beat me,” chuckles Warren, whose The Life Ahead theme “Io sì” lost to H.E.R.’s “Fight for You” that year. “And then, all of a sudden, she DM’s me and she goes, ‘We should work now. It’s time for us to work.’ I’d literally just written ‘The Journey,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is really strange timing.’ I didn’t know who was going to do ‘The Journey.’ And I said, ‘Just come over.’

“I played her the song, and it really got her emotional,” Warren continues. “She goes, ‘This is my story, and I want to do it right now.’ So, literally, I showed her the chords and she played piano, played guitar, sang a vocal. It was one of the best vocals I’ve ever heard in my life — and I’ve worked with everybody! It’s a masterclass of a performance, in my mind. … I remember we were in the studio going, ‘This is so crazy, because this song is also about our journey. I met you when you were 14, and look at all the things you’ve done.’ And now our journeys came together again on this song, and it was really beautiful.”

A lifelong hustler since her own teen years, Warren — who “never got the memo that you can’t do something because you’re a chick,” and once took a courier job for a company called Music Express just so she could sneakily deliver her demo cassettes to record label executives — nabbed her first Oscar nomination nearly 40 years ago for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” That No. 1 hit for Starship, from a rom-com about “a guy who fucks a mannequin,” might have had a shot, if only it hadn’t been up against Dirty Dancing’s “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.” Warren was more disappointed at her second ceremony, when her Up Close and Personal ballad “Because You Loved Me” lost to “You Must Love Me” from Evita. (“I remember Tim Rice calling me the next day and saying, “‘You should have won,’” she reveals.) There was only one year when she didn’t have a prepared acceptance speech “crumpled up in my pocket,” which was when her Con Air theme “How Do I Live” went up against Titanic’s obvious shoo-in “My Heart Will Go On.”

“I’m always losing to someone,” shrugs Warren, who this year is competing against Elton John and Brandi Carlile, the Black Pumas’ Abraham Alexander and Adrian Quesada, and two songs from Emilia Pérez. But she admits that some defeats have been more shocking than others, saying, “There were a couple of years when I really thought I was going to win. … I think a time or two, the camera has been on me [in the Oscars audience] and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’”

Warren’s most disappointing WTF Oscar moment, of course, occurred almost a decade ago. Her nominated “Til It Happens to You,” a haunting Lady Gaga ballad from the campus sexual assault documentary The Hunting Ground — and a rare collaboration for Warren, who as self-described “unicorn” in the business usually works alone — held special meaning for the songwriter, who had been abused by a friend’s father at age 12 and had bonded with fellow survivor Gaga over their shared trauma.

During a TimesTalk panel in 2015, Warren told her assault story for the first time publicly. “All of a sudden, I blurted out that I was sexually molested as a kid, and all of a sudden, I felt like that freed something in me,” she recalls of that unplanned onstage confession. “I remember the weird thing at that same time was going, ‘How many people [have been assaulted]?’ And I was so shocked. … I mean, almost every fucking hand went up. I was like, what? It’s more prevalent than we know.” When she heard an interview about Gaga’s similar experience, she reached out. “We had talked about working together, and I thought, ‘You know what? Maybe this is the one.’ So, I called her and I played her the song, and she was sobbing. I remember that.”

And so, at the 2016 Oscars, Gaga, after being introduced by then-vice-president Joe Biden, performed the song accompanied by 50 survivors, and it seemed like the entire audience was sobbing. “I still think that’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen on TV,” marvels Warren. But minutes later, “Til It Happens to You” surprisingly lost to “Writing’s on the Wall,” Sam Smith’s unremarkable James Bond theme. “Gaga’s performance was so spectacular with all the sexual assault survivors on that stage, and then there was a commercial break, and then it was, ‘And the winner is…’ And it was shocking. I was like, ‘Hey, voters, don’t you wish you could have your vote back after that [Gaga] performance?’”

Warren was still the real winner of the night, thanks to that powerful moment — which is why she’s dismayed that the Academy recently announced that this year’s Oscars ceremony will be forgoing live Best Song performances in the wake of the recent Los Angeles wildfires. (Ironically, this means that H.E.R., who previously won Best Song at the “least-watched Oscars ever,” when pre-recorded performances only aired during the red carpet preshow, is getting robbed of her big Oscar moment yet again.) Last month, Warren herself lost her Malibu beach house of more than 25 years in the fires — “I’d just landed in New York and my friend said, ‘Oh, I think your house burned down,’” she recalls of learning the devastating news — but she doesn’t agree with the Academy’s decision, especially since she thinks H.E.R.’s performance of this “song about resilience” would especially connect with Academy Awards viewers this year.

“I think it’s really unfair, not just to the nominees, but to people that watch the Oscars. … It doesn’t make any sense,” Warren gripes. “Everybody that got nominated has a right to hear their work, but ‘The Journey’ also is very relevant to what’s going on right now. It resonates with a lot of what’s going on, that we’re going to get through this. You’re ‘going through hell, but still you’re going to make it through.’ Don’t you want to see that, hear that sung?”

However, Warren is already looking ahead, hoping that “Dear Me,” her autobiographical Relentless theme performed by Kesha, will be nominated at next year’s Oscars. And she isn’t one to rest on her laurels or wax nostalgic — “Oh, fuck no. My rearview mirror is so cracked, I don’t even look at it. I’m always on to new stuff!” — so she’s more excited about her recent work with Angelique Kidjo, David Guetta, Steve Aoki, and Armin Van Buren. “Sometimes I sit back and go, ‘Wow, this is crazy. I’m from Van Nuys. I had a little logo on my business cards, and now I have a building that I own that has that same logo on top.’ I mean, it is a trip, but I’m still hungry. It doesn’t go to my head,” she insists. “I’m just, ‘OK, next song, next song, next song.’”

But there might be another Oscar in Warren’s future, because in other exciting film news, a Diane Warren biopic, chronicling the songwriter’s own journey, in its very early stages. “Catherine Hardwicke wrote a really great script,” Warren reveals. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I hope something happens with it. …. Catherine’s a great director, and it would be so cool.”

So, which potentially Academy Award-winning actress would play Warren in that Hardwicke film? “God, I don’t know,” she gasps, suddenly at a rare loss for words. “Someone a lot younger.”

Diane Warren exits our interview in a suitably awesome manner.

This interview originally ran on Gold Derby.