There wasn’t a person breathing in the Staples Center after Demi Lovato finished a powerful and emotional performance of her new single “Anyone” during the Grammys Sunday night.
Written and recorded just days before she would overdose and wind up hospitalized, the singer shared with Andy Cohen on his Radio Andy Sirius XM Show how proud she was to be able to bring the song to that stage and the Grammy audience worldwide.
Despite a false start precipitated by emotions, Demi admitted she “was really proud of the vocal and I thought, ‘I’ve never had a moment like this, you know, where I’ve sat down at a piano or that I’ve stood next to a piano and sang my heart out.”
Explaining what happened at the top when she had to pause and have the piano start again, Demi said, “I think I was just overwhelmed and overtaken by emotion.”
“When I performed the song, I looked at the front row and I saw my mom and my two sisters, and I think seeing them in the front row just overwhelmed me with emotion,” she said, adding that she was also overwhelmed thinking about how this was her first performance in a year and a half and thinking of the journey it took from the ICU to this stage.
The song took on special meaning after she came out of the hospital with a better grasp on her life because she was able to better see it for what it was, saying it “represented exactly what I was going through, the vulnerability.”
“Anyone, please send me anyone / Lord, is there anyone? / I need someone.” Demi sang her heart out on the track, which embodied her feelings of isolation and pain as she struggled through her addiction.
“I’m just really, really grateful that the response has been so awesome,” Demi said of the reactions to her performance and the single. “I think people are able to hear that song for what it is, which is a very emotional plea for anyone else listening.”
When she was in the hospital and uncertain of her future, Demi told Andy she determined “if I ever come back from this, I end up going back to music and I’m on stage and I get a first performance, I want it to be at the Grammys and I want it to be this song.”
But while her vision came true exactly as she wanted it to, it certainly didn’t feel like a foregone conclusion at the time. When Andy asked if she thought she might never come back to music, Demi replied, “Absolutely.”
“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” she said, again saying that she would likely be able to give more specifics about her ordeal down the road as she just wasn’t ready yet. “We didn’t know how healthy I’d be when I left, it was a scary time in my life for sure.”
Another difficult time for her came in 2017 when she finally decided it was time to come out to her parents about her sexuality, which she describes as fluid, telling Andy she’s “still figuring it out.”
“It was actually, like emotional, but really beautiful,” she said of the moment she opened up to her parents. “After everything was done I was like shaking and crying and I just felt overwhelmed.”
While she said her dad seemed to “obviously” know this already (that she might end up falling in love with a woman), Demi said she was far more nervous about telling her mom, “but she was just like, ‘I just want you to be happy.’ That was so beautiful and amazing, and like I said, I’m so grateful.”
Next up for the singer is a trip to the Super Bowl this Sunday where she’ll put those powerful vocals behind the national anthem.
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