‘I’m ready to feel like myself ’
Demi Lovato opens up about her queerness, near-fatal overdose and journey to living her truth
Demi Lovato woke up legally blind in an intensive care unit after the July 2018 drug overdose that nearly killed her. It took about two months to recover enough sight to read a book, and she passed the time catching up on 10 years’ worth of sleep, playing board games or taking a single lap around the hospital floor for exercise. Blind spots made it nearly impossible to see head-on, so she peered at her phone through her peripheral vision and typed using voice notes.
“It was interesting how fast I adapted,” she said. “I didn’t leave myself time to really feel sad about it. I just was like, how do I fix it?”
Lovato — the 28-year-old singer, songwriter, actress and budding activist who has been in show business since she was 6 and a household name since her teens — is not just adaptable. She is one of the most resilient pop cultural figures of her time. She got her start on kids’ TV and made the tricky leap to adult stardom, releasing six albums (two platinum, four gold), serving as a judge on “The X Factor,” acting on “Glee” and “Will & Grace,” and amassing 100 million Instagram followers — all while managing an eating disorder since she was a child, drug addiction that started in her teens, coming out as queer and the constant pressure of being an exceptionally famous person.
She recounts her relapse and overdose unblinkingly in the documentary “Dancing With the Devil,” which recently premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival and is being released on YouTube in four episodes. A song with the same name, a brassy, haunting showcase for Lovato’s powerhouse voice, anchors a new album, “Dancing With the Devil … The Art of Starting Over,” due in April.
Documentaries from pop stars about themselves have become a cottage industry, but most feel like sanitized marketing tools and grasp for friction, like the stress of fame or loneliness. Lovato’s film, which follows “Simply Complicated” in 2017, is all tension — 90-plus minutes of mostly interviews directed by Michael Ratner — and doesn’t gloss over the
ugliest realities. She reveals excruciating details about a history of sexual assault, selfharm and family trauma, one troubling scenario colliding into another like dominoes. The film and album are part of a comeback attempt that puts a core part of the Demi Lovato proposition to the test: How honest can she really be?
Pop stardom is a high-wire act on the continuum between fantasy and reality, spectacle and authenticity, escaping and relating. There are the otherworldly untouchables who appear to hover tantalizingly out of reach (Beyonce, Lady Gaga), and the seemingly fully
knowables who feel just an arm’s length away (Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus). A lot depends on how much a musician reveals to her audience. And Lovato has always been a sharer.
“Dancing With the Devil” is filled with fresh admissions that betray previous obfuscations. Her overdose came after six years of sobriety, during which Lovato felt increasingly hemmed in by the measures her longtime managers took to help her stay on track. It caused three strokes, a heart attack and organ failure. She had pneumonia from asphyxiating on her vomit; she suffered brain damage from the strokes and has lasting
vision problems. The drug dealer who brought her heroin that night sexually assaulted her, then left her close to death.
Lockdown, like the recovery time following her overdose, forced Lovato to take a breath, though she spent its first seven months in a whirlwind romance that ended in a broken engagement.
In early 2020, a pause wasn’t in Lovato’s plans. She had a new team led by Scooter Braun and returned to performing at the Grammys and the Super Bowl. But reentering the pop mainstream after a public overdose on hard drugs wasn’t a guarantee.
There would be no album or tour in 2020. But the changes Lovato has undergone — particularly since her August birthday, she said — have put her on a different course. She’s increasingly devoted herself to activism, meditation and, despite her vision difficulties, reading. “This last year provided me so much self-growth and was so beneficial to my spiritual evolution,” she said.
Lovato’s understanding of her identity, as well as the status of her physical and mental health, have been complicated by the matrix of pop stardom. But a new generation of artists, including Billie Eilish, is pushing back against long-held expectations. “I think it was when Billie started wearing the baggy clothes, that was the first time I was like, I don’t have to be the super-sexy sexualized pop star,” Lovato said. “And it also never felt that comfortable to me. Like it’s not the most natural thing to me to go onstage in a leotard.”
That perspective shift led to a cascade of questions: “If
I’m not the sexualized pop star with a big voice, then what am I?” Lovato asked herself. “I feel like ever since that awakening, I embraced my independence. I embraced the balance of both masculine and feminine parts of me. And I do feel in control more so than I’ve ever felt in my life.”
In November, Lovato hosted the People’s Choice Awards in a series of luxurious, flowing wigs because “I’m going out with a bang.” Then she chopped off most of her hair, a move that “felt like the first step in fully embracing myself,” she said. “I’m still on a journey to finding myself, and this haircut was just one step of the process,” she added.
Lovato is from a lineage of megawatt pop singers who can flatten you with a single belted note. The smash off her last album, “Tell Me You Love Me” from 2017, was “Sorry
Not Sorry,” a delectable aural finger wag. But it’s impossible to divorce the sheer force of her lungs from the personality animating it: “You’re like, how does she sound like this?” said her friend Noah Cyrus. “She’s flawless and flawed in all the most perfect ways, all of her raw emotion is there. And that’s what makes the most amazing artists.”
In many ways, Lovato has always shared more of herself outside of her music than inside of it — something that is changing with her new album, particularly as she wrote from a more queer perspective. “When I look back at music in the past that was more hesitant to be as open as I am today, I feel like I just robbed myself of vulnerability in some of those songs,” she said.
Talking about the broader changes in her life, she sounded peaceful, though her journey is far from over: “I’m ready to feel like myself.” She smiled. “I’m finally being honest with myself.”