Spinning all that angst into pop gold

LINDSAY LOHAN couldn’t believe her ears. In early September the actress-singer was recording her second album, “A Little More Personal (Raw),” when she heard Ashlee Simpson’s pop single “Boyfriend.”

“Hey, how long till you look at your own life instead of looking at mine?” Simpson sings. “I didn’t steal your boyfriend ... Don’t you got somewhere to go?”

Talk about personal and raw. Lohan, 19, had recently lost her boyfriend, actor Wilmer Valderrama -- and he’d been linked to Simpson in the celebrity press. So the lyrics had a certain ... sting. Now they were all over the airwaves.

In classic wronged-starlet fashion, her first impulse was to fight back with a song of her own, says songwriter-producer Kara DioGuardi. “Lindsay wanted to write a retort,” DioGuardi says. “I had to be like, ‘Let it go. Let’s not write about that kind of [stuff].’ ”

Not that that sort of thing isn’t in DioGuardi’s repertoire. Less than six months earlier -- before she’d agreed to work on Lohan’s album, which hit stores this month -- she co-wrote “Boyfriend” with Simpson. (She says she had no idea who she was writing about at the time.) “I’m caught in the middle,” DioGuardi says. “I had to be like, ‘I do what I do with you and Ashlee and I’m not here to pick sides.’ ”

She’s carefully neutral, and with good reason. For the last six years, to little fanfare, she has written songs for and with many of the tabloids’ favorite subjects -- Lohan, Simpson, Hilary Duff and Paris Hilton among them. Over that time, DioGuardi has become known within the music industry as a hit-making machine; earlier this month, her behind-the-scenes work was responsible for three of the four fastest-rising songs on pop radio.

But DioGuardi’s more singular skill may be enabling high-profile performers with limited musical acumen -- the new order of ingenues whose primary talent is to be well-publicized -- to broadcast their innermost feelings in autobiographically loaded songs.

Unofficial mother confessor figure to the Us Weekly set, she’s an outsider with a talent for gaining unfettered access to young Hollywood’s soul-baring thoughts.

It’s been lucrative, but DioGuardi admits that the celebrity muse gig hasn’t always been easy. “Sometimes, when I enter a room with a girl who has had no pain, no sorrow and no experience and I have to write songs for her, I almost want to put a gun to my head,” she says. “ ‘Cause there’s nothing to pull on. Art is about pain and struggle.”

Cutting a wide swath

PETITE, vivacious and possessed of a sailor’s salty vocabulary, DioGuardi is 35 but appears to be at least 10 years younger. In early December, she sits stroking her teacup Chihuahua, Tiki, in her Hollywood Hills home. Although a number of celebrity reporters have attempted to interview her about her famous clientele, she says she had turned down all requests. But she’s happy to talk about herself, and on this morning she contemplates her niche crafting songs in the key of celebrity life.

“Some people say, ‘You’re not a real artist’ and I say, ‘Why? I’m a jack of all trades,’ ” she says.

Beyond the Lohan-Simpson circuit, DioGuardi collaborates with a list of performers that reads like a Top 40 Who’s Who: pop chanteuses Pink, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani; rockers Carlos Santana and the indie group Rooney; Latin pop crooners Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony and Enrique Iglesias; and a scattering of former “American Idol” contestants, including Bo Bice, Clay Aiken and Kelly Clarkson. She’s written or co-written more than 60 songs released this year.

“She’s at a place where people in the industry know who she is,” says John Shanks, winner of 2005’s Grammy for producer of the year, who has collaborated with DioGuardi on nearly 100 songs. “She’s on the A-list of songwriters people are going to go to if they’re looking for hits. She’s earned her stripes.”

And finally, she’s writing for herself. Earlier this year, she formed Platinum Weird, a rock group with Dave Stewart of the pop-rock group Eurythmics, and was offered a recording deal at Interscope Records. Platinum Weird’s album is due out in the first quarter of 2006.

“Kara’s somebody who is really on the edge of her intense emotions,” Stewart says. “She’s going a thousand miles an hour with that intensity that makes sparks go off in the room.” He adds: “I can’t believe her voice has been contained for all these years writing for other people. She must have been frustrated to the point of wanting to kill herself.”

Or at least frustrated enough to find some way to justify her emotional investment. “Part of my job is to be almost a psychologist,” she says. “They have to trust you, that you’re going to listen to what they have to say and help them say it in a way they’ll be proud of.”

Enter Lindsay Lohan. DioGuardi spent close to two months preparing with the actress-singer, much of that time getting acquainted with some of the more troubling issues in Lohan’s life -- in particular, her relationship with her father, Michael. Late last year, a judge barred him from making contact with Lohan after he repeatedly violated an order of protection intended to keep him away from his wife and family members. In May, he was sentenced to up to four years in prison for charges including driving while impaired. Michael Lohan has demanded half of his daughter’s earnings as part of his divorce from her mother, Dina, and pitched a reality TV show about the family’s dramas.

The psychic toll of this behavior became the basis for songs on “Personal.”

“If someone comes to me and says, ‘My father broke my heart,’ I can write about it without having to pull emotions from myself,” says DioGuardi. “And it’s real for her, so when she goes out there, she feels it.”

DioGuardi co-wrote Lohan’s “Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father)” and “My Innocence,” on which Lohan sings:

You took my innocence away,

I never had a chance to

You broke me in with your mistakes, thanks for the breakthrough.

Although both songs are about a father-daughter relationship, DioGuardi points out that each has a very different sentiment.

“ ‘Confessions’ was like, ‘Where the hell were you? I loved you and you were nowhere to be found,’ ” she says. “ ‘My Innocence’ is more like, ‘Because of all those things, I had to grow up by myself. And my innocence? You took that away. Thanks a lot.’

“Is it Bob Dylan? Is it that kind of high-level songwriting or artistry? Probably not. But it’s her own expression of what she feels.”

The perception remains, however, that the pop equivalent of a NASCAR pit crew is the real source of those expressions of personal anguish -- shaping them with a touch that turns them to platinum, the sales level Lohan’s first album, “Speak,” enjoyed.

“You surround any artist with the right team, you can make a hit. Your grandmother could make a hit,” observes Stephen Finfer, DioGuardi’s manager and her partner in ArtHouse Entertainment Group, a music publishing and administration company. “Particularly in the studio with what they can do to voices these days, the voice is almost secondary to marketability. The right song is the ultimate equalizer.”

And DioGuardi has had a hand in writing plenty of them, including Stefani’s “Rich Girl,” Bice’s “The Real Thing” and Santana’s “I’m Feeling You.”

Such songs demonstrate her facility with a panorama of pop sounds, from the insistent dance-floor rhythms of Stefani’s hit to the full-throttle arena-rock balladry of Bice’s to the youthful pop-rock flavor of Santana’s collaboration with Michelle Branch.

Recently, she teamed with producer Scott Storch, who has crafted hits for Beyonce and Justin Timberlake, to write four songs for Hilton’s upcoming pop album.

DioGuardi helped the heiress-socialite-reality-TV-star write a highly personal track, tentatively called “Love Me for Me,” but remained uncertain if the song would make it onto the album.

“I [co-]wrote one song that totally deals with Paris’ life,” DioGuardi says. “One part is, ‘So you know that I’m rich? / That don’t mean [anything] / The cars that I drive don’t mean I’m a [bad person] / I don’t need to justify anything I own / I’m proud to sit on my family’s throne.”

“It’s essentially, ‘Love me for me and underneath everything I have, I’m still a real girl. I want to be loved for who I am rather than what I have.’ ”

DioGuardi’s original goal was to be loved for who she is, and what she sang about, rather than for the songs she put in others’ mouths.

Raised in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., in what she calls a “right-wing” household -- she is the daughter of the late Republican Rep. Joseph J. DioGuardi -- she earned a degree in pre-law from Duke University before attempting a musical career.

She searched for a toehold in the music business and landed a job assisting Timothy White, editor in chief of music industry trade bible Billboard magazine. There, she learned many of the hard lessons about the recording world the easy way: She read about them. And White, a veteran music journalist, imparted the lasting creative advice she’s used so often with her clients: “If you haven’t been through a lot of pain in your life, you can’t be a great artist.”

Through it all she wrote. And with a combination of luck, determination and shrewd networking, a song DioGuardi wrote wound up with Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue, who turned it into a smash European hit, “Spinning Around,” in 2000. Within a year, DioGuardi built a celebrity clientele: Dion and Iglesias were two of her earliest collaborators. And DioGuardi’s career as a performer took a back seat to steady -- and highly lucrative -- employment.

“When she has an idea, she can sell that idea not only lyrically but physically,” says her frequent collaborator Shanks. “Kara has written songs where she sings the demo and then the artist learns and sings the song. She can dictate the way it would go.”

Stewart was introduced to her by Interscope Geffen A&M; Records Chairman Jimmy Iovine, who recruited them to craft songs for A&M;’s pop-burlesque act, the Pussycat Dolls. But nothing they wrote “was right for the Dolls,” Stewart says. Even so, “we just knew that we were doing something that wasn’t run-of-the-mill. It was a relief when Jimmy came and said what we already knew: ‘You’re a band.’ ”

Experiencing darkness to embrace light is a theme that runs through Platinum Weird’s album. One song, “Crying at the Disco,” deals directly -- if obliquely -- with DioGuardi’s work for other artists.

“While everyone’s happy all around me, I never had my shot at what I really wanted to do,” she says. “It’s about not belonging despite appearances.”

Interscope has already paid for a documentary about the creation of Platinum Weird, shot by Los Angeles film collective Tomorrow’s Brightest Minds. But even if the band’s success isn’t guaranteed, money ceased to be an abiding concern for DioGuardi years ago. She retains the publishing rights to every song she has ever written and continues to earn a percentage of every sale on songs scattered throughout a number of platinum-certified albums -- to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per project per year.

Her songs have been featured on TV commercials for Doritos, the National Football League and Coca-Cola. And a track she wrote for Duff, “Come Clean,” is the theme song for MTV’s reality TV show “Laguna Beach.” DioGuardi collects royalties every time it’s played.

She appears proud -- and somewhat surprised -- when she is reminded of her staggering catalog of hits. But in terms of reaching pop music’s pinnacle, the singer-songwriter still feels she has a way to go.

“I’m looking at the rest of my life,” DioGuardi says, cradling her dog in her lap. “I want to write the quintessential pop song. I still haven’t had that moment -- one of those moments in pop time that defines an era.” And with that, she begins to sing.

Contact Chris Lee at calendar.letters@latimes.com.