Crushing deadlines and high expectations are the stuff of life for Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren.
She’s the muse behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charts, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry.
She also wrote Dua Lipa’s certified platinum smash hits “New Rules” and “Don’t Start Now."
A little-told story behind those Dua Lipa hits trails through wild Wyoming to a secluded cabin in a remote area near Wilson.
Called the Outpost Cabin, it’s a three-bedroom, two-bathroom haven that includes a songwriter’s studio.
Warren outfitted that room with her piano, situating it so she looked out onto a view that she saw as a symphony all its own.
Warren has just listed the cabin for sale at $3.495 million with Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty.
The singer-songwriter is selling the home because her life is about to change dramatically.
She’s getting married, and she and her fiancé plan to start a family soon. They've decided it’s time to move closer to family in New York.
Warren stumbled on the Wilson area thanks to a road trip that took her through Jackson Hole just as her music career began taking off.
“This was like 2016, 2017,” Warren told Cowboy State Daily. “And I just, like, immediately fell in love, and I was always kind of like that will be the place when the time comes that I’m ready to have drawers to put my things in.”
Warren didn’t look at many cabins at all. In fact, the Outpost was the first one she saw, and it completely stole her heart.
“It was like it was meant to be,” she said. “After I saw it, my heart was racing and at every other house we went to see, I was like, I said to the agent, ‘We don’t have to keep doing this tour. I’ve made my decision, and I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to see any other houses.’”
Drew Taggert with The Chainsmokers in Emily Warren's Wilson, Wyoming, cabin which has also been a songwriting studio. Warren won a Grammy as a co-writer of The Chainsmokers' hit "Don't Let Me Down." (Courtesy Emily Warren) 
Music being made in Emily Warren's songwriting studio in her Wilson, Wyoming, cabin. (Courtesy Emily Warren) 
Emily Warren seated on the couch of her cabin in Wilson, Wyoming, while writing "Dont Start Now," which became a smash platinum-selling song for Dua Lipa. She's working with songwriting partner Caroline Ailin. (Courtesy Emily Warren)
Bittersweet Journey
When Warren first moved into the Outpost Cabin, she kept marveling that it had been for sale at all.
She couldn’t imagine ever selling the cabin herself.
“It’s such a beautifully built, special place,” Warren said. “And I have gotten so much out of it. So many amazing things have happened there.”
But now she understands how it can be that such a place would be for sale at all. Life takes some twisting turns, just like the songs she writes.
Still, leaving is bittersweet.
“I actually, like, sobbed when we decided we’re going to sell the house,” Warren said. “It’s so hard. But we’re going to have kids in the next couple years, and we just want to be close to family.”
It was the perfect retreat for Warren to escape the stress of Los Angeles by being in nature. It never failed to recharge her creativity.
“You get really busy, and there’s deadlines, and there’s things you need to do for certain people,” she said. “And that’s part of what drew me to Wyoming. It’s close enough to everything to get there in a couple of hours, but it’s removed enough that you can kind of like silence the distractions.
“And I have the piano with the beautiful views, so I can really just kind of forget about everything and remember, bring back, why I started (writing songs).”
A Rocky Start
Warren’s interest in music had a rocky start.
When she was a child, her parents were determined that she and her brother would take piano lessons and learn to play the classics.
But they were kids and not much interested in Bach and Beethoven.
“We hated practicing for it,” Warren admitted. “But they found a teacher, like, in the 11th hour named Jen Bloom after so many fights about it, and instead of teaching us Beethoven, which as an 11-year-old wasn’t really getting us going, we could pick any song.
“And she would teach us how to sound it out, and then how to play the chords of that song, so we could play music we actually loved.”
On occasion, the teacher would also play songs that she loved, or sometimes even songs she herself had written.
“I remember the moment that actually clicked for me,” Warren said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, people write songs. That’s how songs happen.'”
In songwriting, Warren found an outlet she hadn’t known she’d needed.
“I was 11, 13 years old with high, high emotions happening,” she said. “And I would just run home after school every day and just like need to pour it out onto the piano. That’s how I really fell in love with songwriting.”
A Gauntlet Is Thrown
Warren’s made a name for herself with her authenticity and lyrics that feel ripped from the pages of life.
Her musical career was just starting to take off when she moved into the Outpost Cabin in Wilson.
And the stakes at the time for herself and her fellow writers, Ian Kirkpatrick and Caroline Ailin, couldn’t have been any higher.
Their Dua Lipa song “New Rules” had been this massive global smash hit — one that many fans still consider Dua Lipa's biggest ever.
Could they do it again?
Warner Records threw down the gauntlet to Ian Kirkpatrick, challenging the trio to come up with something fresh and fabulous.
Warren had just set up her new home studio at the time. She'd invited a few of her songwriting colleagues out for a week or two to make music together, and it was proving to be just the thing to charge up everyone’s creativity.
There was something energizing about the wilderness landscape, where bison and moose are likely to wander by, like the rustic log cabin home itself.
So, when the trio was challenged to recreate its “New Rules” success, it was natural for Warren to invite Kirkpatrick and Ailin to Wyoming and experience the magic for themselves.
“So, they came out to kind of just brainstorm ideas and get some music started,” Warren said.
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty) 
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty) 
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty) 
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty) 
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty) 
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty) 
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty) 
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty) 
Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Emily Warren is behind some of the biggest pop stars on the charges, including Shakira, Lizzo, and Katy Perry. She wrote a pair of Dua Lipa’s platinum hits in her Wilson cabin getaway, which has just been listed for $3.495 million. (Courtesy Ashley DiPrisco, Jackson Hole Sotheby’s International Realty)
Disco Night Saves The Day
Still, even nature can only do so much.
Tensions were high, so the trio decided to take a night and blow off some steam at the Stagecoach Bar’s locally famous Disco Night.
“That’s been around honestly forever,” DiPrisco told Cowboy State Daily. “Disco Night has been almost like a rite of passage for any youth in Jackson Hole.
"It’s just this funky bar in downtown Wilson that’s been there forever, and they have such an old-school vibe. I mean, I think my parents even went there in the 1970s, and '80s.”
People come from all over the place for the event, some of them even dressing up in full disco costumes.
“They play like the best disco songs,” Warren said. “And it’s really fun and silly.”
Ailin was getting over a breakup at the time and met a sweet and funny firefighter while she was at Disco Night.
“We were cheering her on,” Warren said. “And then, when we went back up to the house that night, she was like, ‘I feel kind of guilty, because I know I’m not in this relationship anymore, but I still feel like I sort of belong to him.'
"So, we were like, ‘Why don’t we write, first of all, a disco song, because we’d been inspired by what was playing that night. But second of all, a song that’s kind of about letting go of feeling like you owe this person anything.”
Dancing Through The Pain
The song that came out of that wild Disco Night was “Don’t Start Now,” another of Dua Lipa’s all-time biggest hits, and the first of many Warren has written at her Wilson cabin retreat.
Warren writes songs every day and has hundreds of writing credits to her name, including The Chainsmokers with “Don’t Let Me Down,” “Capsize” (with FRENSHIP), “Side Effects” (with The Chainsmokers), and “Phone Down” (with Lost Kings).
She’s been featured by Time Magazine as pop music’s secret weapon and by Rolling Stone as a trailblazer, helping give pop music a new path to the future.
That’s all thanks to Stagecoach’s Disco Night, which inspired “Don’t Start Now," whose lyrics pay a nod and a wink to Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 anthem “I will Survive.”
In one of the verses, Dua Lipa sings, “Aren’t you the guy who tried to hurt me with the word goodbye? Though it took some time to survive you I’m better on the other side.”
After “Don’t Start Now” came out in 2019, it was credited as a catalyst for a 2020 disco revival, transitioning away from slower, downtempo, urban-styled music that proved too depressing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It had been a huge risk at the time, one that had everyone panicking at first. Disco-inspired music just wasn’t what was trending at the time.
But its dancing-through-pain theme struck just the right chord during the pandemic and helped fuel the song’s wild success.
Turning A Page
Warren said she can’t help but feel a little of wild Wyoming’s landscape in her heart every time she hears the song because of where it was written.
“This is gonna sound a little, like, out there,” she said. “But there’s an energy to the (cabin), whenever I have people there, whether we are writing or watching a movie, or sitting outside and looking at the stars.
“It’s going to be hard to recreate that.”
Warren’s first night in the cabin, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, she still remembers how three shooting stars went by in the skies above.
“I was like, ‘What is this place?’" Warren said. “And so, every single time I got there, whatever I was worried about or stressed about or concerned about just immediately melted away walking into there.
"It was life-changing for me, especially at a time when so many things were kind of picking up for me in my career, and it was getting like intense and more and more demanding.”
To have an escape like Outpost Cabin where she could get centered again and focus on songwriting was a priceless thing.
Leaving Wyoming is bittersweet for Warren, but if there’s one thing she knows from a career writing songs that have become famous for touching the heart, it is that life is always all about change.
“This is just like the end of that chapter for me,” she said.
But it’s also a page turning to a new chapter of life.
There’s no telling what’s next, but one thing is sure for Warren — it will always be full of music and love.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
