Demi Lovato is on their ninth life.
Having been in the spotlight since they were a child, where they got their start on Barney & Friends, they’re no stranger to being in the public eye and producing pop hits. Since the beginning of their music career, they’ve had a steady stream of major success, with one common denominator: honesty.
“La La Land,” from their debut album Don’t Forget, contained the lyric “I’m not a supermodel, I still eat McDonald’s,” and professed their stance on staying true to themself. Lovato has always been an artist known for their raw transparency. Over the following years through songs like “Skyscraper,” “Nightingale,” “Cool for The Summer,” and “Father,” we were led on a journey through addiction, bullying, redemption, loss, and exploration of sexuality. But never have we heard music from Demi Lovato so tenderly personal until now—with Dancing with the Devil…The Art of Starting Over, their seventh and newest album release.
The album opens with Lovato’s soaring 2020 single “Anyone,” which marked their first return to music after their 2018 overdose. The single “Dancing with the Devil” grittily outlines their descent into relapse, and is followed by a harrowing ballad dedicated to Lovato’s younger sister, “ICU (Madison’s Lullabye).” From there, we’re tossed into the present—an intimate look into Lovato’s life now, post-overdose. After suffering and surviving three strokes, a heart attack, brain damage, impaired vision, and a sexual assault, Lovato sings about their fresh start on the breezy “The Art of Starting Over,” proclaiming, “I let the darkness out.”
What follows are summery, stadium hits like “Lonely People,” laden with backing gang vocals, and snappy dedications to the end of eating “Melon Cake” for birthdays. On the latter, they sing, “No more melon cakes on birthdays/no more barricades in doorways/finally get to do things my way,” setting the tone for their new outlook on life.
On the Ariana Grande trap-beat collaboration, “Met Him Last Night,” the two songstresses share their individual trauma through the metaphor of meeting the devil, in one of the more lighthearted moments on the album, in comparison to the stark reality of others. “15 Minutes” details Lovato’s reaction to their broken engagement to Max Ehrich, who was scrutinized online for being a social climber and using them for fame. On the surface, the song comes across lightly, but in the rasp and dry chuckle Lovato injects into the song, you can feel the hurt that lingers.
One thing that’s apparent over the course of the album: Demi Lovato is healing. In “California Sober,” they belt “tired of being known for my sickness/it didn’t work I’m trying something different,” and “it doesn’t have to mean the growing part is over,” illustrating their new take on sobriety and mental health. Similarly, Demi has explored their complicated relationship with their father through music over the years, expressing pain, hurt, and guilt. Now, on “Butterfly,” they seem to have reached a place of healing, singing, “It was painful/it was needed/see you changing right in front of me/you were never really graceful/now you’re just what you’re supposed to be/I can feel you/like I need to.”
Furthering their introspective exploration of their queerness on the 2015 hit “Cool for the Summer” with “The Kind of Lover I Am,” Lovato explicitly expresses their sexuality in a way the experimental vibe of the former never did. In turn, we are watching a version of Demi Lovato that feels more complete than ever.
Other highlights include familiar forays into demonstrating their powerful vocals on songs like “Easy,” featuring Noah Cyrus, or the slinky “My Girlfriends Are My Boyfriend” with Saweetie.
While many might be skeptical of Lovato’s honesty, after three documentaries that each proclaimed sobriety before a relapse, that’s exactly the point this album is making. In the past, Lovato was the reformed Disney girl, redeeming themself with the album Unbroken, and then the growing, strictly all-or-nothing sober spokesperson in 2017’s Simply Complicated. What we’ve never seen before is Demi Lovato the person, the one behind the role model. We’ve never seen Demi Lovato for who they are, truly, behind their self-proclaimed popstar mask. They’ve been the poster child for sobriety, eating disorder recovery, and a false bipolar diagnosis, forcing them into another version of the perfectionist structure that led them to trouble in the first place. They were never allowed to be imperfect, to be messy, to simply be, like their fellow Disney Channel peer Miley Cyrus has achieved. At the end of the day, Demi Lovato is in recovery. But we shouldn’t be waiting for their downfall, holding them to unattainable standards. In their own words: “This album helped me fall in love with myself because I’ve never been able to really feel super confident and stable on my own.” Dancing With The Devil…The Art of Starting Over announces: This is the person underneath it all.
