Demi Lovato Crushed the National Anthem at the Super Bowl

From Esquire

A mere week after her powerful performance at the Grammys, Demi Lovato was back on the biggest of American stages at tonight’s Super Bowl, where she brought down the house with a stirring rendition of the National Anthem.

Wearing a suffragette-white jumpsuit, Lovato took the stage at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, where she lent her impressive pipes to the familiar song that opens each year’s game. At last week’s Grammys, Lovato performed her new ballad, “Anyone,” which she wrote just four days before her near-fatal overdose in July 2018. It was her first performance since the overdose, marking her return to the stage.

In a pre-Grammys interview, Lovato said, “This song was written and recorded actually very shortly before everything happened. I recorded the vocals for it four days before. The lyrics took on a totally different meaning. At the time when I was recording it, I almost listen back and hear these lyrics as a cry for help. And you kind of listen back to it and you kind of think, how did nobody listen to this song and think, ‘Let’s help this girl.'”

Performing alongside Lovato tonight was Christine Sun Kim, a deaf artist recently featured in the Whitney Biennial, who sang the anthem through American Sign Language (ASL). Kim, the first deaf Asian American to perform the national anthem at the Super Bowl, said of her feelings about being chosen for the gig, "With the NFL’s massive platform, we can actually bring sign language to millions of homes. Representation matters a great deal to me, and I hope that seeing a Deaf person signing the anthem will bring attention to various issues that plague our community: language-deprived deaf babies, police brutality towards disabled people, a lack of mental health services, and many others."

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