Sao Paulo
Demi Lovato feels renewed. That’s what she’s trying to say with “Revamped,” an album out on the 15th that brings together rock versions of her biggest hits like “Cool for the Summer” and “Heart Attack.” At 31, the former Disney star wants to bury the pop personality that made her famous over the last decade.
Lovato hits the main stage of The Town festival in São Paulo this Saturday, September 2nd, when the event begins at the Autódromo de Interlagos and runs until the 10th. Their show is at 8:50 p.m.
The American, who performed three times in Brazil last year on the tour for the album “Holy Fvck” (2022), should bring a similar version of these shows to The Town, where she relies on arrangements full of loud guitars and bass.
There is also expectation that Lovato will invite the Brazilian Luísa Sonza to the stage, who had the American sing for the first time in Portuguese on the track “Penhasco2”, released this week with the album “Escândalo Íntimo”. Videos showing the two artists rehearsing the song at The Town were circulating on social media this Friday as Lovato arrived in Brazil.
On Lovato’s latest album, “Holy Fvck,” she rocks out about masturbation and religion, says she’s had an encounter with God, screams that she’s a holy whore, and opens up about her drug addiction story.
These are signs of an artist who wants to mature in the eyes of the public and move away from the songs about teenage romance from her first albums, released when she was still an actress on Disney’s closed television network.
If your concerns before were being able to wear a dress with sneakers, as you sing in 2008’s “La La Land,” or the comings and goings of your flirtations, which are reflected in the lyrics of “Don’t Forget” and ” Here We” “Go Again” was released when she was 16 years old. Now Lovato wants to be seen as the grown woman she is.
“It is interesting. I used to play songs about breakups and think about the person. Nowadays I play them and I don’t think about the person I wrote them for,” she told Rolling Stone magazine. “It is different. I think as you mature, you move on and songs start to have a different meaning to you.”
It’s not that the singer is ashamed of how she started her career. So much so that she says she felt the urge to rerecord her old songs in a new guise precisely because she wanted to continue playing them live.
The desire to renew herself as an artist and as a person also stems from the overdose that Lovato suffered in 2018, which almost killed her.
A month after releasing “Sober,” a song in which she confessed to not being sober, the singer took a bunch of drugs in the early hours of the morning, suffered three strokes, a cardiac arrest, pneumonia and multiorgan failure. Her doctors said five minutes longer could have killed her.
In the documentary “Dancing with the Devil,” released almost a year after the incident, in which she recounts her overdose in four videos, she also says that she was raped by the drug dealer who sold her the drugs. “They found me naked. He left me in bed to die after taking advantage of me,” she says in the video.
Two years after her overdose, Lovato turned her neardeath experience into music. On the album “Dancing with the Devil… The Art of Starting Over” she sings about dancing with the devil, talks about her stay in the intensive care unit and claims to have become a master in the art of a new life to start.
It wasn’t the first time Lovato had a drug problem. In 2010, the singer had to cancel a tour with the band Jonas Brothers to go to a rehabilitation clinic a place she visited several times afterwards. Last year, Lovato told the Call Her Daddy podcast that she started using drugs at age 12 and tried cocaine at 17.
Lovato was 9 years old when she started her artistic career by acting in the children’s series “Barney and Friends.” Years later, Disney cast her in the lead role in the 2008 film “Camp Rock.” In the same year she released “Don’t Forget”, her first album.
Lovato was so successful in the film that she later won the lead role in the series Sunny Entre Estrelas, which aired on Disney Channel in 2009. The following year she released Camp Rock 2. She left Disney in 2011 to pursue her singing career and in the following years released albums mixing pop and R&B.
After withdrawing due to the pandemic, Lovato took to her social media in 2021 to say that she was beginning to identify as a nonbinary person and that she would like to be addressed with neutral pronouns. It only took a year for her to adopt female pronouns again.
“I’ve been feeling more feminine lately. Everyone is confused about pronouns, especially when learning about themselves. It’s a question of respect,” she told the “Spout” podcast in August last year.
After suffering through fame, Lovato finally seems to be in control of her life and career. So much so that he will release a documentary called “Child Star,” which means “star child” in Portuguese, in which he will tell how growing up in the spotlight can change a person’s life forever.