She’s on a different path now, embracing a jarring and totalizing honesty. Three years ago, she nearly died of a heroin overdose just a month after releasing “Sober,” a harrowing first-person account of feeling shame after admitting to a relapse.
STORY OF MY LIFE SONG ALBUM SERIES
The series and the new album Dancing With the Devil… The Art of Starting Over present a hard reset for Lovato so profound that it feels like we’ve met a new person. In Dancing, people in the singer’s close circle seem surprised by her willingness to discuss the more unflattering points in her history the purpose of the album-release doc is to show us that you’re having fun and in a great place. Dancing is Lovato’s third behind-the-scenes doc, but in the first five minutes, you learn that the others didn’t quite get the entire story - a ride we’ve been through with her before, since in 2017’s Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated, we found out that she’d done her interview for 2012’s Demi Lovato: Stay Strong while high on cocaine. You come away really feeling for Lovato, who weathered family trauma and mental-health struggles as a child before being whisked up into the pageant circuit and ultimately into the exacting teen-celebrity machine of the 2000s, which made household names of Lovato, Selena Gomez, the Jonas Brothers, Lindsay Lohan, and others, sometimes at a cost. As a kind of secret history of the singer, actress, and sometime reality-TV regular who pivoted from Disney Channel roles to legit multi-platform renown at the end of the aughts, Dancing With the Devil cuts through the surface narrative we’ve been given to mitigate Lovato’s highs and lows throughout the last decade. YouTube’s docuseries Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil has been a clinic in the drastic measures we often take to keep up appearances. Maintaining composure was hard sometimes, crumbling made sense. (It is strange, still, to be able to say this and really, truly mean it.) Stresses multiplied, chaos ensued, and people went to great lengths to cope. The past few years have been a rollercoaster for everyone on the planet. People are unpredictable, capable of fooling even the best judges of character, and sometimes you don’t find out what they’re really going through until they lose control. You never know what’s hiding behind a person’s smile - whether a chipper veneer is a genuine expression of a person’s bubbly nature, a front for someone who’s suffering, or a lure from someone harboring dark intentions. My Life, nevertheless, emanates from some deep, dark place where both sadness and happiness cohabitate and turn into one single, beautiful sorrow.Lovato in the music video for “Dancing With the Devil.”
Blige's strain is sleekly modern and urban, and the grit in it comes from being streetwise and thoroughly realistic about the travails of life. Blige took a huge leap in artistry by penning almost everything herself (the major exception being Norman Whitfield's "I'm Going Down") in collaboration with co-producers Combs and multi-instrumentalist Chucky Thompson, and everything seems to leap directly from her gut. My Life is, from beginning to end, a brilliant, wistful individual plea of desire. The hip-hop part of the combination takes a few steps into the background, allowing Blige's tortured soul to carry the album completely, and it does so with heartwrenching authority. But it is some of the finest modern soul of the '90s, backing away to a certain extent from the hip-hop/soul consolidation that Blige introduced on her debut album. This certainly isn't your parents' (or grandparents') soul. The melodic sources this time around, though, are so expertly incorporated into the music that they never seem to be intrusions, instead playing like inspired dialogues with soulsters from the past, connecting past legacies with a new one. The production is not exactly original, and there is evidence here of him borrowing wholesale from other songs. Perhaps the single finest moment in Sean "Puffy" Combs' musical career has been the production on this, Mary J.