Diane Warren Spoke About Lady Gaga and "'Til It Happens to You" in Recent Interview

'Til It Happens to You, the 2015 ballad by Lady Gaga and Diane Warren, was talked about by Warren in a recent interview with The Wrap.

“I remember writing that song and thinking, ‘Oh, my God, this is definitely one of my best songs.’ The movie is about sexual assault on campus, but I always thought the song could be bigger than that, so in the lyrics I never said what the It was. It’s whatever you’re going through when people say, ‘It’s going to get better, just give it time.’ But when you’re in it, you’re like, ‘You don’t know how it feels until it happens to you.’

Warren then continued on to discuss how she got Lady Gaga to collaborate with her on the powerful song, "And then I called Gaga, because I had heard that she had said something on Howard Stern that she’d been raped. I thought, ‘I’m just going to take a chance and play her the song. And if she’d gone through that, it’s going to connect with her.' I played her the song and she was sobbing on the phone."

“But nobody wanted that song to come out. The label, management, nobody wanted it to come out. So I called my friend, (director) Catherine Hardwicke, she listened to the song and said she’d do a video, I put in some of my own money, she put in some of hers, the actors worked for free, she made this brilliant video and then we leaked it out and it blew up," Warren stated.

After working hard to get the song, video, and message out, Lady Gaga then sang it at the 2016 Oscars and received a standing ovation. Warren had this to say on the powerful performance: “At the Oscars, that performance was just stunning on every level. That was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. People were sobbing in the audience, and then there was a commercial break and they came back and said, ‘And the winner is…’ and I thought, ‘What just happened?’ That was my memory of the night: I just kept saying, ‘What just happened?'"