Demi Lovato is opening up about her long-awaited eighth studio album, its devastating subject matter, and personal themes. The Grammy nominee, 30, just sat down for an in-depth and poignant interview for the Call Her Daddy podcast with host Alex Cooper, and detailed the trauma that inspired her emotional rock album, Holy Fvck, that dropped on August 19th.
“I’ve just had a lot of trauma in my life,” the Camp Rock alum explained. “There’s a persistence, a determination, inside of me. I think I learned that from, like, the bullying experience of like, ‘You can turn this around and make it into something great.’” The “Cool For The Summer” hitmaker also said they are sober again after leaving treatment in December of last year.
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“I feel great,” Lovato added, detailing how she felt while recording her new LP. “But there were all these emotions that I left treatment with. And I wanted to convey them in my music. And so the first few songs are, like, really angry. And it’s like, ‘This is who I am. Take it or leave it.’”
In the interview, Lovato also discussed her childhood, and how watching her mother suffer from an eating disorder affected her. This, Lovato stressed, caused her to develop bulimia. “Beauty pageants are awful for children’s self esteem,” the musician explained. “They teach you to ignore your emotions until you go to your hotel room and can cry it out. It was this toxic environment of who is more beautiful. … At such a young age, it confuses you.”
Lovato also heartbreakingly pinpointed the start of their struggle with depression to be before the age of 10. “I had this understanding that life was only going to get more difficult,” they remembered, adding that they “had suicidal ideations at the age of 7.”
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The Princess Protection Program star also reflected on her tumultuous Disney past, telling host Cooper that she “lived in fear” of any scandals coming to public light and ruining her career, “If something happened, there would be conversations,” Lovato said. “That pressure of ‘You are replaceable’ was always there.”
She also said that this point in her life was insanely busy, “Every year I filmed a season of a TV show, I went on tour, I made an album and I shot a movie. I did that for three or four years,” Lovato added. “If I had a hiatus from my show, I would have the tour bus pull up to the studio and take me on tour for one week or I would fly to London to do promo.”
Lovato said they currently believe that this “extreme work load” pushed them to seek unhealthy coping methods. “At a certain point, I was paying for the roof over my whole family’s head,” she continued. “It was that pressure of, ‘I am paying for everything and I need to keep going because if things start to disappear, so do the finances.’”
The “Confident” artist also spoke about her struggle with addiction, and the sad truth of how it all began. “I started experimenting for the first time when I was 12 or 13,” Lovato confessed. “I got into a car accident and they prescribed me opiates. My mom didn’t think she would have to lock up the opiates from her 13-year-old daughter, but I was already drinking at that point. I had been bullied and was looking for an escape.”
After Lovato’s mother prevented her from taking those pills, Lovato began finding and seeking their mother’s Xanax. “At 17, it was the first time I tried coke and, like, loved it too much,” they said. “And then [that] kinda bled into me going to treatment right after I turned 18.”
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