"I was not ready to become sober": how Demi Lovato faces his demons squarely | The music

W While the news that the 25-year-old singer and actress Demi Lovato is currently recovering from an alleged overdose in a Los Angeles hospital is shocking, she is tainted with a devastating feeling d & # 39; inevitability. The documentary Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated of last year, published in support of his sixth album Tell Me You Love Me, describes the fierce battles of the Disney actress against depression, bulimia, self-harm, drug addiction and alcoholism

. Point she describes twice where she almost did an overdose. "One thing I will never stop doing, is to be honest," she says in the trailer. "It's the best I can do." Earlier this year, this honesty was translated once again into her music via the Sober piano ballad, in which she apologized to fans, friends and family for being addictive again after six years of sobriety. .

While the teenage boom of the late '90s promoted the idea of ​​brilliant robots, masking all human failings under a veneer of perfection, Lovato, bruised by his own experiences and conscious of their universality, has always been the spearhead an open and honest alternative that matches the insecurities of our digital age. She was, and is, her own fan base. Growing up, she was intimidated, which led her to the house. She was obsessed with the idea of ​​perfection, keeping a collage of women she wanted to have the bodies. "I have Amy Winehouse out there that I watched and I wanted to be so bad," she says in Simply Complicated. "I wanted to be as thin as she, I wanted to sing like her, I wanted to be like her."

An early child, at the age of 18, Lovato was one Disney's biggest exports, with the very popular Camp Rock films alongside the Jonas Brothers. His first two albums of sugar-rush pop, Do not Forget of 2008 and Here We Go Again of 2009, both in the top 3 American. On the shiny surface everything seemed fine. In 2010, however, she left a Jonas Brothers tour to enter a treatment center for "physical and emotional problems." The tipping point was a fight in a plane in which she hit a back-up dancer in the face. Rather than turning history to save her reputation, Lovato said that she took "100% responsibility", later detailing her treatment in the MTV documentary Demi Lovato of 2012: Stay Strong and announcing that She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder

needed to create a direct dialogue with her fans via her music, the 2011 Unbroken album, titled so speaking, dug into that pain. The legendary Skyscraper ballad, which she had first recorded amidst her addictions in 2010, was to be the first single from the album. While most of Unbroken had completed her rehabilitation, Lovato decided not to re-record Skyscraper's raw and original voice, even though, as she told Ryan Seacrest, she was the product of a bingeing purge. , "ruining [her voice] after each meal". She added: "For me, it was so symbolic, it's the song I recorded before the treatment and yet I'm delivering a message.It's so crazy the way that things went off, that ended up being my symbol and represented what i was trying to get the word out – get help and raise above any problem with my fans. "

Unbroken also featured For the love of a girl, a song about her difficult relationship with her birth father, who died in 2013 of cancer, and was an addict and alcoholic. She reveals in her latest documentary that she first tried cocaine at the age of 17 while she was working for Disney. From her father, she said, "I guess I've always looked for what he found in drugs and alcohol because it filled him up, and he chose him for a family." Their relationship would come back in Daddy Issues, Tell Me from last year. You love me. "I grew up having a strange relationship with my biological father," she told Rolling Stone. "This has caused relationship problems and certain behaviors in the future." Before Sober announced his relapse in June of this year, Lovato had already emphasized the central truth of the addiction: that the addict himself must want to improve In Simply Complicated, she talks about her treatment in 2010 – admitting that she was not entirely successful, and that she was actually under the influence of cocaine then she was questioned about her apparent sobriety for the MTV film two years later. "I was not working my program," she says with typical honesty. "I was not ready to become sober. . I snuck into airplanes, sneaking into the bathrooms, sneaking through the night. Nobody knew it. "

It makes the closing line of Sober – essentially an open confession, and one of the most courageous and powerful lyrics about addiction – all the more heartbreaking." I'm sorry for To be still there, I promise to receive help, "she sings." It was not my intention, I'm sorry for myself. "