(“I’m not gonna change / In the La La Land machine,” she assured us, over roaring Warped Tour guitars, on track one of album one.) The elegant yet rowdy crossover diva of 2011’s Unbroken and 2013’s Demi. The post-Disney pop-punk anti-princess of her 2008 solo debut Don’t Forget and 2009’s Here We Go Again. Verily, Lovato has a monster voice and always has, a deep and sultry and shattering bellow that has served her well across the various dizzying arcs of her 13-year pop-star career. Wow, her voice sounds great, you think, and two seconds later you remember, as the YouTube series politely points out, that she sounds great because she basically spent two years on forced vocal rest while she fought for her life. Very much by design, it’s all Devil and no Dancing. “Dancing With the Devil,” the song, is an expert slow-burn barrage of Bond Movie Theme extravagant melodrama, her spare and trembling opening line-”It’s just a little red wine, I’ll be fine”-echoed one verse later by ”It’s just a little white line, I’ll be fine / But soon that little white line is a little glass pipe.” This album is emerging on the cusp of a summer that, vaccine efficacy willing, might actually feel like summer, and yet it’s the precise opposite of pop-star escapism: The real-world catastrophes that inspired these songs won’t let the songs, or you, breathe for even one second. I like this new music very much, and yet the music is definitely not what I will remember three years from now. But that was three and a half years ago.ĭancing With the Devil, the album, feels like dutiful promo for Dancing With the Devil, the beyond-gritty documentary series, and not the other way around. And I was further invested in Demi Lovato as both a fragile human and a towering pop star. I remember how casually Lovato tossed off the line, “I actually had anxiety around this interview, because the last time I did an interview this long, I was on cocaine.” And I remember tearing up when Lovato’s jiu jitsu instructor teared up while fantasizing about one day presenting Lovato with a black belt, if Lovato lives that long. In the three and a half years since Lovato’s last gritty YouTube doc, the feature-length Simply Complicated, Taylor Swift did one, and Ariana Grande did one, and Billie Eilish did one, though of course Lovato’s last doc is grittier than all three of those combined. The intimate pop-star documentary is now a crucial element of the pop-star experience: It’s humanization, it’s diversification, it’s therapy, it’s album promo. I also had pneumonia ’cause I asphyxiated, and multiple organ failure.” And I have blind spots in my vision, so sometimes when I go to, like, pour a glass of water, I’ll, like, totally miss the cup because I can’t see it anymore. I suffered brain damage from the strokes. To be specific, she overdosed on heroin laced with fentanyl on July 24, 2018, in the culmination of her relapse after six years of sobriety. “I actually don’t think people understand how bad it actually was,” the 28-year-old veteran pop star explains, in the second episode of her ongoing YouTube documentary series, Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, which premiered in late March. These harrowing details pile up until you can no longer hear the lush pop song itself. (She woke up legally blind some of the damage to her recovered vision is permanent.) The sponge for her sponge bath dragging slowly across the “survivor” tattoo near where the blood tube used to be. The family and friends shuddering at her hospital bedside for the 24 hours or so in which her survival was in no way assured. The hospital tube sewn into her neck to pump out her blood, clean it, and pump it back in. That drug dealer looming ominously over her unconscious, unclothed body. The unzipping of the drug dealer’s duffel bag. The wine glass, the cocktail glasses, the shot glass. The music video for Demi Lovato’s lush new single “Dancing With the Devil”-released Friday alongside her seventh album, Dancing With the Devil… The Art of Starting Over-is a detailed re-creation of her 2018 drug overdose, sexual assault, and harrowing near-death experience. Content warning: This article discusses substance use, mental health, eating disorders, and sexual assault.
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