RISE AND SHINE
Still shy of 21, Demi Lovato has lived many lives—and learned how to manage the drama.
The greenroom on the New York set of Live With Kelly and Michael is strangely desolate at 9:30 this Thursday morning. An abandoned clothing steamer belches out vapor. A picked-over fruit plate languishes on a folding table. On a monitor in the corner, the show’s unsinkable hosts, Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan, introduce Demi Lovato to their frenetic audience. As she bounds into the studio, a half-dozen members of her entourage stream into the greenroom. “Oh, jeepers!” exclaims one of them, settling into an adjacent sofa to watch his frontwoman take her perch on a glorified barstool. “She looks great in a jacket.”
Everyone observes silently as Ripa embraces Lovato, and the camera immediately cuts to a gaggle of teenage girls sobbing into their smartphones. Before devolving into watercooler conversation, Ripa brands Lovato a “victorious story,” praising her new single, “Heart Attack,” and glossing over her rehab-at-18 narrative that, to be fair, has already been amply explored in the tabloid press over the last two years.
“I just want to hug all of you,” proclaims Lovato to her applauding fans, stretching out her arms to the audience.
Just a few months shy of her 21st birthday, Lovato’s jubilation is justified. Last fall, she made her prime-time debut as a judge on Fox’s hit series The X Factor, where she outshone a wan Britney Spears and sparred ferociously but adorably with host Simon Cowell. Her popularity was so obvious that Fox promptly renewed her contract; Spears and fellow judge L.A. Reid are not returning. “Even though she can be really, really annoying, I truly enjoyed working with her and so did the artists,” said Cowell upon the announcement.
“Musically, I didn’t really know my ‘thing’ until ‘Give Your Heart a Break’ came out, and I realized that my voice sounds best on pop music,” she says in the greenroom post-performance, referencing her 2012 breakout single and peeling back the wrapper from a Starbucks snack tray. “Sorry, I’m going to talk with my mouth full.”
This spring, “Heart Attack” debuted as the No. 1 single on iTunes in 25 countries, and today’s performance on LIVE is just one stop of many that have her belting out angsty lyrics like “Never break a sweat for the other guys/ When you come around I get paralyzed” with an ample backup ensemble. But the Lovato formula—punching her fists into the air and manhandling the mic while launching into arpeggios with abandon—is so highly watchable, it’s almost embarrassing.
Raised by a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, Lovato began her career at age eight, playing a character on the Texas-produced series Barney & Friends, where she met pal and fellow Texan Selena Gomez. By age 15, Lovato was living in L.A. and fully Disneyfied: After co-starring in the gangbusters TV movie Camp Rock, she scored the lead in the series Sonny With a Chance. Her first few albums were released simultaneously, and by 2010, she had enough musical draw to open for the Jonas Brothers.
And then there was scandal. After six months on the road, Lovato clocked a backup dancer and immediately checked into an inpatient facility, where she received treatment for eating disorders and emotional issues. “Once I went into rehab, it was kind of like, ‘Well, that image is over,’ and there is not much I could really do about that, which was terrifying,” she says, carefully applying peanut butter to an apple slice. “I thought, ‘I might as well talk, so I don’t have to worry about things coming out later.’” Lovato took charge of the story, telling Robin Roberts and millions of 20/20 viewers about being bullied as a kid, which she says led to bulimia and self-mutilation. Now an outspoken anti-bullying advocate, she says, “I take my role model status really seriously. I mean, I have a mouth like a sailor, but I don’t want to do anything that would let anyone down.”
She has to be especially careful, thanks to The X Factor and the TMZ treatment imposed on its stars. “When I first joined the show, I was afraid that people wouldn’t take me seriously, because I am so young and I hadn’t had a No. 1 hit yet,” she admits. “I was really afraid of not being up to par on the things I was critiquing in other people. It made me more self-conscious of my own music, but it made me work harder.”
Lovato’s fearlessness is nothing new. “Well, I’m a Christian—I don’t ever push it on people now, it’s just my belief—but when I was growing up, I felt that God told me it was my calling to share the word,” she reflects. “So when I was, like, seven, I would get on an airplane and sit next to a stranger and start up the conversation: ‘Are you saved? You’re not going to go to heaven if you are not saved, so if you want to pray the prayer right now, we can do that.’”
Her proselytizing days are over, but to celebrate her 21st birthday, Lovato is eschewing the usual shots-at-a-Vegas-club in favor of a trip to Kenya on behalf of the charity Free the Children. “I like to say that I’m allergic to alcohol,” she says with a shrug. “If you were to tell me a couple of years ago that my life would be what it is today, I would be like, ‘Oh my God, shoot me. This is so boring.’ It’s a big night out if I go to the movies.”
When she’s not touring the world or filming her show, Lovato says she’s focusing only on projects that her fans can relate to in a positive way. In other words, don’t expect to see her on-screen donning a ski mask and gunning down drug dealers. “I haven’t seen it,” she admits of Spring Breakers. “I heard it has a lot of drinking and using, so as much as I want to see it, I feel like it might be a trigger or something. I kind of have to stay away from movies like that...and parties and clubs.”
For the past year, Lovato had been holing up in a sober living facility, but she just purchased her own apartment in Los Angeles and is now living alone for the first time in her life. “It’s so stressful, figuring out the furniture thing,” she says. “Just make my room pink! But it was really important to me to have a view, because there’s something calming about being able to meditate in front of a view of the entire city.”
As she takes the last bite of a hard-boiled egg and prepares for an afternoon full of meetings, Lovato doesn’t seem too troubled by her demons. “It’s not that I don’t care what people think,” she says. “But in some ways, I really don’t.”