Aging 'Idol' Ventures Fourth

After college, she landed a position at Billboard magazine in New York, a gig that provided her with an early mentor (former editor Larry Flick) and a break (an audience with none other than Paula Abdul). Upon hearing her demo in 1998, Abdul's response was beyond anything DioGuardi expected: She invited the young songwriter to relocate to California so they could collaborate.

DioGuardi moved into Abdul's house and quickly got to work. Before long the roomies had penned "Spinning Around," a bubbly dance track that would go on to become an international hit for Aussie pop queen Kylie Minogue. "It launched my writing career," DioGuardi says. "And the revenue from it kept me from having to go back to my day job." As her reputation as a songwriter began to grow, her aspirations to become a singer quietly took a back seat.

After that, the ascent of DioGuardi's songwriting career lines up in almost perfect tandem with the dominance of "American Idol." The show left an enormous mark on the popscape -- in DioGuardi's case, for the better. "I've sold a lot of records with the songs I've written or co-written through the 'Idol' machine," she says. "It's been very lucrative for me."

In addition to providing Clay Aiken, Katharine McPhee and Bo Bice with radio-ready material, DioGuardi excelled at penning songs for artists who wouldn't have lasted five minutes on "Idol." (Case in point: Ashlee Simpson's charmingly frothy "Pieces of Me." The world remembers it as the tune Simpson didn't flub on "Saturday Night Live." Washington go-go fans remember Rare Essence's cover version when it coated local airwaves in 2004.) Other hits co-written by DioGuardi followed, including the Pussycat Dolls' irresistible "Beep" and Christina Aguilera's 2006 speaker-scorcher "Ain't No Other Man."

As her success continued in the studio, DioGuardi made a quick detour into television in 2006 as a judge on "The One: Making a Music Star," ABC's ill-fated "Idol" knockoff. "I liked the show because it had a mentoring aspect to it," says DioGuardi. "It was much more about getting [the contestants] from one point to the next and then letting the audience judge that. I felt like I could really help these kids, and some of them were really good kids." (The show only lasted a pitiful two weeks.)

But DioGuardi never lost that mentoring sensibility, and her long slog through the industry and storied ascent up the charts is likely to win her oodles of clout with this season's contestants. Perhaps they'll realize that nobody this season is being judged more carefully than her.

"Sometimes I feel more like the contestant than a judge," DioGuardi admits. "There's no training for this. . . . Suddenly you're on television in front of 27 million people and you need to look amazing, you need to speak correctly, you need to have your shtick down."

She spins back around in her chair. "You need to know who you are."