Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The several thousand shrieking girls in the audience might not have noticed, but things weren’t going smoothly for Demi Lovato during her concert at the Prudential Center here last month. For the first few minutes, as she sang and pranced across the stage, not a sound came from her microphone. Later she flubbed lyrics on a few songs. On Lovato’s face, barely masked by the grin of the longtime pro, were persistent flashes of concern, discomfort and fear.
It was the night before her latest film, “Princess Protection Program,” was to make its debut on the Disney Channel, where Lovato, 16, is an ascendant star, the heiress apparent to the tween-pop crown.
But where in the not-too-distant past that would have meant she was an automaton of joy and relatability, Lovato is already proving to be far more intriguing, and far less predictable.
About midway through the show came “Catch Me,” one of the best songs on her new album, “Here We Go Again” (Hollywood), and the only one for which she receives sole writing credit. Like those that preceded it, it threatened to become something of a shambles.
But as Lovato eased into the lyric, intimate and measured, a calm spread over her. Her shoulders eased. Rather than overwhelm the crowd with razzle-dazzle, she turned inward, and for a few moments looked as if she might prefer to be playing in a coffeehouse somewhere, where the lights weren’t nearly as bright.
“Catch Me” was “written by myself in my room,” Lovato had said earlier that day, taking a breather at the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan. “Those songs mean more to me than when we’ve got two weeks to finish an album and I’m with three different writers.”
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