Demi Lovato: It's Not That Deep, Really

Demi Lovato is so over being American pop's troubled prodigal diva.

After many years of making headlines for her missteps as the most rebellious graduate from the Disney school of child entertainers—even going so far as to hold a punk-rock funeral for her pop-princess era in 2022—she's flipping the script this year.

The past several months have yielded big, heartening changes for the 33-year-old superstar. In May, she married singer-songwriter Jordan "Jutes" Lutes in a picturesque ceremony in Santa Barbara. In August, she performed a few numbers from the 2008 breakout musical film Camp Rock alongside her costars the Jonas Brothers during their headlining show at MetLife Stadium. And in October, Lovato flew to Paris for her first-ever fashion week, where she debuted a sleek, cosmopolitan look and rubbed elbows with fellow celebs at Vivienne Westwood, Coperni, and Ann Demeulemeester shows.

Released on October 24, her ninth studio album, which she flippantly dubbed It's Not That Deep, debuted in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 and climbed to number one on the Top Dance Albums chart. Lovato, now three years in recovery from addiction, drew inspiration from EDM and nightlife to wrestle back her right to have a good time.

"The tone of this album is fun… Dare I say, cunty?" she says excitedly at a studio space in the San Fernando Valley, where we convened before her rehearsal. She hopped out of a black SUV wearing a cozy gray sweater, black leggings, and oversize shades, taking time to greet every crew member on set. Behind us was the slate backdrop from her album cover, shot by Daniel Sachon, which sees Lovato posing with a dry-cleaning bag at the center of a generic portrait studio while surrounded by a disorderly gathering of people and animals.

"I'm standing strong in the midst of all this chaos, and it's no secret that my world is very chaotic, the very public life that I live," she explains.

That Saturday night, she would perform her new material live for the first time at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles or, as it became that night, Club Demi. Flanked by screaming fans in their 20s, many of whom grew up seeing Lovato on television, the singer emerged catlike and commanding in a black lace bodysuit, undulating with her backup dancers to the skittish electronic beats that underpin her latest record. The opening song "Fast," a lusty work of biker-coded, hyperpop romance, revved up the crowd early on, but they were soon reeling from a surprise performance of "This Is Me," the Camp Rock classic she recorded as a teenager.

These additions to her set list seemed a far cry from the darkly confessional balladry of her previous albums, such as 2021's Dancing With the Devil… The Art of Starting Over and 2022's heavy guitar driven Holy Fvck. This year, she's not only resuscitating her pop era, but she's also honoring her full journey, one she first embarked on when she was a child.

"I want to go back to pop. I love pop music," explains Lovato. "It's not that I didn't have fun performing Holy Fvck, because I absolutely did. But I noticed when I played my throwback songs, there was a connection to the audience that really stood out to me."

"I used to write deeply personal, emotional songs based [on] what I had been going through or past experiences," she adds. "This album, I wanted to solidify, right out the gate, that we're gonna have fun with this, and it's not that deep. It's not as serious as the music I used to make."

In the spirit of It's Not That Deep, Lovato's press cycle has fittingly yielded callbacks to some of her funniest moments. This summer on the Just Trish podcast, Lovato recalled the 2022 video in which she joined a bunch of ghost hunters in a haunted house and serenaded an alleged ghost. ("I was so stoned," she says to host Trisha Paytas.) This Halloween, she dressed as an infamous character named Poot Lovato—a viral meme derived from an overexposed photo once taken of the pop star on the red carpet—and she even brandished a bald cap for accuracy.

Lovato's natural joie de vivre was always palpable in the exuberance of her voice and the enthusiasm of her on-screen characters, yet her robust energy was often overshadowed by the specter of her trauma.

Born Demetria Devonne Lovato in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Lovato grew up in Dallas. She learned to act and dance from a young age and landed her first television role in 2002 in the children's show Barney Friends. Lovato also sang in the choir at her local Baptist church, but the stringent values often clashed with the reality of Lovato's home life. Her mother was a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who championed Lovato's burgeoning acting career, but Lovato's late father, a musician and engineer, suffered from untreated mental illness and substance abuse, a pain he externalized by lashing out at the family.

The friction between Lovato's public and personal life grew more pronounced when she began appearing in various Disney shows at 15. Around the same time, she was sexually assaulted by a fellow actor. As she continued to excel in her career, she privately descended into drug use, self-harm, and disordered eating to cope with the aftershock.

Lovato addressed all this and more in her last album, 2022's Holy Fvck—a rock 'n' roll bloodletting years in the making with both her volume and emotions dialed up to 11. Lovato, who began writing the record after a 2021 stint in rehab, leaned on a grittier hard-rock sound to unpack the baggage she'd been carrying regarding her sobriety, the queer contours of her sexuality, and the conflicting Christian teachings that had warped her sense of self from adolescence.

This heightened clarity surrounding her past also prompted Lovato to examine the lives of former child actors and musicians in the 2024 documentary Child Star, which she codirected with Emmy-nominated documentarian Nicola Marsh. The film featured exclusive interviews with such prominent actors and comedians as Christina Ricci, Raven-Symoné, Alyson Stoner, Drew Barrymore, JoJo Siwa, and Kenan Thompson.

"I had a blast working on Child Star," Lovato says of the documentary. "But I also did a lot of healing for myself to be able to come out of that experience with some tangible change that hopefully the rest of the country will follow suit on."

The film made a political activist of Lovato, who began amplifying the cause of protecting children in entertainment during her interviews. In a September 2024 segment for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, she confirmed that legislation advocating for minors working on social media had reached California Governor Gavin Newsom's desk. She tells me, "I kind of put [Governor Newsom] on the spot. I was like, 'There's a bill that needs to be signed.' … Then the governor called me the next day on my way home, and he said, 'All right!'"

On September 26, 2024, Newsom signed two bills into law: SB 764, which establishes financial and legal protections for minors featured in monetized online content, and AB 1880, which expands the existing Coogan Law to protect the financial interests of minors who are employed as content creators on online platforms such as YouTube.

"Every album that I've written has served its purpose. Some albums were more emotional than others," says Lovato. "Holy Fvck was probably, dare I say, the most healing, and it served its purpose."

She adds, "It's because of that album [that] I met my husband."

Lovato married Lutes, her partner in love and music, on May 25 at the luxe Bellosguardo in Santa Barbara. They said their vows before 135 people—the bride in a pearly Vivienne Westwood gown, the groom dressed in Saint Laurent. The two first met in January of 2022 during a songwriting session for Holy Fvck.

"We became friends before we became lovers," explains Lovato. "I opened up to him because I was going through a really rough time when I made Holy Fvck. I had just come out of treatment, and I was newly sober and raw with my emotions. I had nothing to medicate with. He was there for me as a friend, helping me get through this deep depression I was in."

It was incidentally while writing the ballad "Happy Ending" when Lovato began to sense there was a deeper well of love that lay beneath their friendship.

"It's probably one of the most vulnerable songs I've ever made," says Lovato. "I didn't know we were going to become lovers. I definitely didn't know that we were going to get married one day. But that was the session that made me feel safe with him."

In December 2023, nearly two years into dating, Lutes proposed to Lovato in a room filled with roses and learned guitar to serenade her with an original song. The two have continued to work on music together, and Lutes penned the UK garage inspired track "In My Head" on It's Not That Deep.

"I had been in past relationships where I thought, 'Oh, this is the long game!' But I hadn't taken care of myself yet," Lovato says. "The universe rewards you when you do the therapeutic work on yourself, [and] I had to do the work. Because of that, the universe provided. I got myself ready for a life by myself, and then I was able to share it with somebody else."

"I had expected to be married by a certain age. There's all this pressure that society puts on you, but it just organically happened," Lovato continues. "I'm really happy. I told my husband today, 'I've never been more in love with you. I didn't know my love could grow for you more so than it already has.' The timing was perfect."

Allowing herself to write songs from this state of euphoria required a gradual process of glittering up her sound. Some of the songs from It's Not That Deep began as rock songs, in the same vein as Holy Fvck, before they were retooled for a more maximalista pop bombast.

"I [initially] wanted to go even more rock with this album," says Lovato. "I started writing and was like, 'Wait, it's really hard to write happy rock songs!' It just wasn't resonating. I didn't have as much anger left inside of me. That's not to say that every rock song has to be angry, but the vibe wasn't fitting anymore. I [thought], 'I want to go back to pop.' I love pop music! I have so much fun performing it onstage too."

Lovato eventually consulted fellow pop icon Kesha ("That's a supportive queen right there," notes Lovato), whose raunchy bop "Joyride" became one of Lovato's favorite songs from last year. Kesha recommended she meet the song's producer, Zhone, who happens to be a guitar player and metal fan but prefers to "match the diva energy," he says on a recent phone call.

"I mean diva in the best way," he explains. "I like singers with big, incredible voices. I want music to feel huge. How do you make something just… explode?"

With Zhone's metallic touch, Lovato's club-faring songs—in part inspired by the timeless dance floor vulnerability of artists like Robyn and Charli XCX—skew more hard candy than bubble gum. Zhone and Lovato started working together on the song "Frequency," a diva-house track with angular synth flourishes meticulously tailored for a ballroom walk-off or a RuPaul's Drag Race lip-sync challenge.

"When he got to the studio, [I was] like, 'What vibe should we do today?'" Lovato recalls. "He said, 'Well, I made this beat in my Uber…'"

Despite her newfound musical direction, Lovato is not actually much of a raver or club kid. "Look, I'm sober," she says matter-of-factly. But she's been sighted out and about in West Hollywood with friends, celebrating her album release. Zhone recalls being one of Lovato's honored guests at the Avalon for Gag, a party frequented by many a pop star and drag queen, from Zara Larsson to Trixie Mattel.

"Demi pulled me and my friend [party promoter] Alex Chapman onto the stage, and we [were] just going crazy," Zhone says. "In L.A., it's not necessarily like that. Most of the time as a producer, you go to the event for the song that you produced, and you'll have a hard time getting in. They're like, 'Who are you?' As a professional, she tries to make people feel included in a way."

For Lovato, the club no longer symbolizes a site of debauchery. In its purest essence, the club represents a site of belonging for human beings, people in recovery included. "[Clubbing] is not conducive to my lifestyle, but when we go out, I'm chugging Red Bull—no, Celsius—and we're having a great time," she says. "I protect my energy while also still savoring those moments and picking special occasions to go out and have fun and dance."

It's also an energetic pressure valve for the star, who still gets the itch to "get the gaggle of gays together" and dance all night. She hopes to replicate that communal vibration in the upcoming North American It's Not That Deep Tour, which kicks off on April 8, 2026, at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.

"It wasn't really necessarily the lifestyle of clubbing that I [wanted] to chase. It's the feeling of the music. No matter where you are—if you're at the club or you're in your bathroom getting ready or in the car—the feeling that you get from the music … [is] the freedom and empowerment that I feel today," she says.

Photographer: Agata Serge
Stylist: Chris Horan
Hairstylist: Fitch Lunar
Makeup Artist: Loftjet
Manicurist: Natalie Minerva
Creative Director: Alexa Wiley
Set Designer: Francis Cardinale
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Erin Corbett