‘TELL ME TO MY FACE’

IT took a few weeks for Kara DioGuardi to find her rhythm as the new judge on “American Idol” – especially when it came to dealing with Simon Cowell.

“Simon would say, ‘Oh she’s talking too much, she’s this, she’s that,’ so I had to pull back a bit at first,” DioGuardi, 38, told The Post.

“I kept thinking, these people are very successful, and they’re a big part of making the show such a huge success. I didn’t want to upset them and I didn’t want to come in and upset the balance of the show to the point where it breaks up the magic, but at the same time, I had to figure out a way to be myself.

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“I would get a vibe [from Simon], I could tell when he was irritated. I didn’t always understand the way he did his thing, how he rolls out his schtick.”

Overall, her early run-ins with Simon, “weren’t too bad,” she says.

“I wasn’t running into my dressing room crying or anything. I’d rather be told exactly what is on someone’s mind, to my face.”

DioGuardi says that eventually Simon would tell her to her face that she was getting on his nerves.

“I’d feel it, and I’d get a look from him and let him finish speaking,” she says.

On the show, DioGuardi will sit between Randy and Paula. In her early days with “Idol,” producers had seated her between Paula and Simon.

“But they kept trying to communicate, and I didn’t want to be in the middle of that,” she says.

DioGuardi, who grew up in New Rochelle and is the daughter of former Republican Rep. Joseph J. DioGuardi, has had a hand in producing or writing songs on more than 100 albums for major stars ranging from Celine Dion to Gwen Stefani.

She started her career in music as an assistant to the editor at Billboard magazine and broke into show business when she slipped a demo tape to Paula. The future “Idol” judge loved the demo so much she flew DioGuardi out to her LA home to write what became “Spinning Around,” Kylie Minogue’s comeback single in 2000.

All the hype about her joining “Idol” has left DioGuardi reeling.

“I’m a behind-the-scenes person, so all of this is new to me – getting photos done, hair and makeup, and being asked what type of person am,” she says.

“‘I’ve never really thought about these kind of things before. I’m just me.”