Demi Lovato is known for her pop career after being launched as a teen sensation by Disney in the late 2000s. The singer announced her return to the music world with her first album after a near-fatal overdose in 2018, when she was 26 years old.
In a lengthy interview with The New York Times , Demi talks about the pressure to be a role model for teenage audiences when she was still a Disney star, known for films like Camp Rock and Princess Protection Program . With all that expectation, the artist felt pressured to hide certain preferences in life, including her passion for metal bands.
At 15, Demi liked death metal and black metal, and listed the bands Job for a Cowboy and Dimmu Borgir as her favorites in a 2008 interview with Rolling Stone . The young woman was backstage on the Jonas Brothers and was apprehensive about revealing this unusual preference for fear of the reaction of Gary Marsh , president of the Disney Channel at the time.
“I had a metalhead boyfriend,” she tried to explain. “I don’t want kids listening to Job for a Cowboy. But there’s something unique about metal. When someone gets on a microphone and screams – I can’t do that. I listen to pop music and think, ‘OK, I get it’ – and that doesn’t fascinate me. What fascinates me is metal.”
Many years later, the singer explained to the New York Times why she was so apprehensive about commenting on something as trivial as musical taste. "I remember thinking, 'I know I'm a role model and I shouldn't like dark music like metal, but I do,'" she told the newspaper.
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