- - Diane Warren reveals how bullies and mean girls inspired her song 'Dear Me' — and why Kesha was the only person to sing it

Gerrad HallJanuary 12, 2026 at 6:30 PM

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JC Olivera/Deadline via Getty

Diane Warren and Kesha at Deadline's 2025 Sound & Screen Film event in November

After writing songs for more than 100 movies, Diane Warren needed a song for her own documentary, Relentless, and you better believe she wasn't about to ask someone else to ask someone else to write one for her.

"I never would have thought to get another songwriter, especially since it's my story," she tells Entertainment Weekly. But she admits, "It was a challenge. What do I write? I've written songs for so many movies. What do I write for a movie about me? When I write a song for a movie, I'm tying it up emotionally or I'm writing a song I wanna hear, whether it's at the end of the movie or in a movie. So what is that for me?"

Warren — who won an honorary Oscar in 2022 with 16 nominations to her credit, as well as 16 Grammy nominations, including one this year for Best Music Film for Relentless — found inspiration in a simple question: "What would I say if I could write a note to my younger self?" A take on that became the first line — and the opening lyric — that Warren wrote for the song "Dear Me."

"None of our lives are easy, are they, when you're a kid, but mine definitely wasn't. I got bullied a lot. Kids were really mean. Girls are really mean," she says, laughing now. "They're like, they're the worst."

Don Holtz

Diane Warren

Fortunately, she had the support of her dad, but her mom was a different story. While she felt her mom "didn't believe in me," she came to realize it was more that she was worried her daughter couldn't make a career out of songwriting.

Add to it, "I hated school. I got kicked out of a lot. I was in juvenile hall. And I was a really lonely, lonely kid who really felt unseen, unloved, and I felt like the world was against me when I was a kid," she says.

So, "Dear Me" became "a love letter to that young girl, that it's gonna be okay that you don't see it right now," she explains. "Once I tapped into that, that that's why I wanted to say that... it really made me cry."

She's not the only one. "Even though I wrote this about me, so many people come up to me and tell me that this song is really touching them. I was at a Christmas party this guy, someone I would least expect to feel like that, came up to me and said this made him wanna hug his younger self," she recalls. "That's just one example, but so many people feel like it's their song, too. So even though it was a personal song, it's such a universal song at the same time."

Helping deliver the message with her vulnerable but then powerhouse vocals is Kesha.

"I'm not gonna sing it because I sound like s---. But who's authentic to this movie and also can bring something amazing to it?" Warren says of her other job as song casting director. She turned to Kesha, who she's known for a while. She compares her vocal performance on "Dear Me" to what Lady Gaga did on the song they co-wrote, "Til It Happens to You," for the documentary The Hunting Ground, about campus rapes in the U.S. "I know that Kesha's had a hard life and, of course, all the other stuff she's gone through. And I just felt like this would speak to her, would speak to her soul. And I also knew what a great singer Kesha is. I can't think of one other person who could do this justice."

In Relentless, Warren says it's "one of the best songs I ever wrote." What does she think distinguishes it from the countless others in her catalog, including "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," "Because You Loved Me," "If I Could Turn Back Time," and "Un-Break My Heart"?

"Clive Davis makes fun of me going, 'You always say that about all your songs and everything's your best.' And I kinda sometimes do because I get so excited about a song, but this has lasted. It stayed with me that I think it's one of my best songs," she says a year after the release of Relentless. "There's just something really magical about this song. Maybe it's because it's from my doc, but I don't think that's it because I'm very objective with my songs. I wouldn't like it more because it's from a movie about me, you know? But I do think it was the exact right song to write for this movie. I think Kesha was the right artist to do it."

Check out more from EW's The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV, movies, and more.

Diane Warren: Relentless is available to rent or buy on digital platforms. Watch Kesha's official music video for "Dear Me" above.

on Entertainment Weekly

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”