Following Mickey Guyton’s stirring performance of “Black Like Me” during Sunday’s Grammy Awards, her label EMI Nashville has partnered with fellow Universal Music Group label Republic Records to promote the song to adult contemporary stations. The new version is dubbed “Black Like Me (Our Voices).”

“We believe in the power of ‘Black Like Me’ and after speaking with Republic, they too felt there was a bigger audience for this song,” Universal Music Group Nashville president Cindy Mabe tells Billboard. “They serviced the song to multi-formats Monday and are currently working it to AC radio.”

While “Black Like Me,” which EMI Nashville released in June during the protests following the death of George Floyd, has only received a few spins so far from a handful of stations, “I think ‘Black Like Me’ will do well with our listeners and they’ll certainly be able to relate,” John Anthony, PD at AC outlet WJKK, Jackson, Miss., tells Billboard.

“Black Like Me” saw immediate sales gains following Guyton’s appearance, selling 1,600 copies after the Grammys on Sunday, according to MRC Data. That signified a staggering 13,225% increase from March 13 and was enough to land Guyton among the artists seeing the biggest sales gains immediately following the telecast.

The song received a nod for best country solo performance, making Guyton the first Black woman to be nominated in that Grammy category.

Universal Music Group Nashville deployed a similar tactic in 2019 after Kacey Musgraves won four Grammys, including the coveted album of the year prize for Golden Hour. The next morning, UMGN’s MCA Nashville serviced “Rainbow” to Country, AC, Hot AC and Triple A radio.

“Black Like Me” has not appeared on any of Billboard’s country charts since its release nine months ago, and airplay for Black women remains staggeringly low. According to a study released last week titled Redlining in Country Music: Representation in the Country Music Industry (2000-2020), only 2.7% of country radio airplay over the past two decades was for songs performed by women of color.

Guyton told Billboard recently that she has “made peace” with the fact that country radio may never play her. (Her song “Better Than You Left Me” peaked at No. 34 on Hot Country Songs in 2015). “A white friend of mine signed to a major label was told by a radio promo person that country radio will not play Black people. So I realized I’m not going to get on any kind of country station,” she said. “And I’m certainly not going to do that by falling in line and shutting up and singing. I’ve made peace with that. I may not ever have some massive career, but I’m going to use the influence I have to open those doors for the future generation. And for young Black and Brown girls who have dreams that people will never consider, I’ll consider them. I’ll see them. And I will use the connections that I have to help them.”

Republic did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Demi Lovato doesn’t hold back one bit about what led to her 2018 heroin overdose and what the future of her sobriety holds in Dancing With the Devil.

The four-part YouTube Originals docuseries, which opened SXSW on Tuesday (March 16), takes place over three years since she started filming a completely separate, now-shelved documentary that was meant to follow the pop superstar around her Tell Me You Love Me Tour.

In fact, the clips of her past performances and talk of the doc’s companion album Dancing With the Devil… The Art of Starting Over, which she recently announced will be released on April 2, doesn’t add up to a total of more than 10 minutes over the course of the four 22- to 28-minute episodes. The album is about where she is today, but where she was on July 24, 2018, the morning paramedics arrived at her Hollywood Hills home after she had overdosed on heroin, takes precedent in the new feature.

Even from the trailer she released on Feb. 17, fans couldn’t begin to wrap their heads around how much damage Lovato had suffered from her overdose, including three strokes, a heart attack and blind spots in her vision that don’t allow her to drive anymore.

Dancing With the Devil, directed by Michael D. Ratner, is not a by-product of her discarded 2018 documentary. It has a completely different foundation, refocusing her narrative from center stage — as seen in snippets of the previous performance-heavy feature Lovato says would’ve only captured the “tip of the iceberg” — and opening up the floodgates about her 2018 overdose while the cameras began rolling again in 2020. The anecdotes are so harrowing that YouTube Originals featured trigger warnings regarding addiction, mental health, eating disorders and sexual abuse ahead of each episode.

With the entire docuseries having premiered at SXSW on March 16, and ahead of the first two episodes making their debut March 23 on YouTube Originals, here are the 10 biggest revelations we learned from Dancing With the Devil.

Father’s Day Triggers Her Fear About Her Biological Father’s Death

Her biological father Patrick Lovato, who died in June 2013, also struggled with alcohol and addiction on top of bipolar and schizophrenia. Lovato notes no one in her family knows the exact date of his passing because his body, which she added had been discovered a week and a half after his death, was “too decomposed” upon discovery for an open-casket funeral.

She says she spends every Father’s Day contemplating which day he passed away on. “And then also knowing that by the time Father’s Day rolls around, he was just laying there, rotting,” she says. “That was the fear I always had for him was that he would end up alone — and he did. He died alone.” The singer had been estranged from her father since 2007 after witnessing him abuse her mother, Dianna De La Garza, who wrote about it in her 2008 memoir Falling With Wings: A Mother’s Story.

She Wrote “Sober” Shortly After Her Introduction to Hard Drugs

One month after DJ Khaled and Kehlani celebrated Lovato’s six-year anniversary of her sobriety at a March 16, 2018-dated concert, Lovato confesses in the doc that she relapsed with alcohol and drugs one month after the show. “I’m surprised I didn’t OD that night,” she recalls of the night she picked up a bottle of red wine and contacted someone she knew would have drugs on them.

“I ended up at a party. I just so happened to run into my old drug dealer from six years before,” she continues. “That night, I did drugs that I had never done before. I had never done meth before — I tried meth. I mixed it with molly, with coke, weed, alcohol, oxytocin. And that alone should have killed me.”

Her dear friends, Matthew Scott Montgomery and Sirah, emphasize her secrecy about that night and how it plays into her pattern of hiding details from her family and friends. “The thing was is that we really didn’t know about the drugs,” Sirah says during her interview portion.

Lovato shares that two weeks after the party, she was introduced to heroin and crack cocaine. While on a trip to Bali, she realized she had a physical dependency on the hard drugs and wrote her June 2018 somber anthem “Sober”; performed it on tour that wrapped by July. By the time she returned to L.A., she began heavily using again. “That is one thing that I was very good at is hiding the fact that I was addicted to crack and heroin,” Lovato says, her eyes flitting across the floor.

Her Assistant’s 911 Call Saved Her Life

On the morning of July 24, 2018, Lovato’s assistant at the time, Jordan Jackson, discovered the singer’s immobile body in her bed and called head of security and chief of staff Max Lea in a panic. While Jackson describes more people rushing into the house, she recalls sneaking downstairs out of fear of “[getting] in trouble for calling 911.” She had been alerted by someone in Lovato’s home to instruct the operator that there be no sirens, but the operator said he had no control over the matter.

In his interview, Lea commends Jackson for her action, adding he was “quite impressed” with how she handled the emergency. The medics who arrived quickly administered Narcan, a nasal spray version of naloxone that reverses the effects of an opiate overdose, before rushing the performer to the hospital.

“I’m really lucky to be alive,” Lovato, who suffered what one of her physicians said was “multiple organ failure,” reflects while thinking about what the doctors had told her. “My doctors said that, like, I had five to 10 more minutes, and had my assistant not come in, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Lovato’s Inability to Recognize Her Little Sister Was Part of a Full-Circle Moment

Her younger sister Madison De La Garza describes the moment she first saw Lovato in the hospital and grabbed her hand. “And she looked me dead in the eye, and she said, ‘Who is that?’” De La Garza tells the camera.

Lovato woke up legally blind following her heroin overdose, and she remembers asking her younger sister who she was, which caused De La Garza to start sobbing because, according to the artist, “she thought from then on, I was not going to be able to see.” One of Lovato’s doctors, neurologist Dr. Shouri Lahiri, explains with Lovato by his side in an interview that one of the initially affected areas of her brain were the vision centers.

Lovato calls it “ironic and in a weird way, poetic” that she couldn’t physically recognize her little sister. The reason, she explains, is that one of the reasons why she first became sober was because her parents said she couldn’t see De La Garza, despite her best efforts to want to have a relationship with her younger sibling. “God has a twisted sense of humor sometimes,” Lovato chuckles while blotting away her tears.

There Are More Layers to the Night She Overdosed

Toward the end of the second episode, Lovato says that on the night of July 23, 2018, she didn’t just overdose.

“I’ve had my fair share of sexual trauma throughout childhood, teenage years. And when they found me, I was naked. I was blue,” Lovato says of the morning following the visit from the man who supplied her drugs. “I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me.”

Despite telling her doctors that she had had consensual sex, the singer adds it wasn’t until a month after her overdose that she realized she was not “in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.”

When the Going Got Tough, Scooter Braun Got Going

While Lovato stayed in The Cirque Lodge rehabilitation facility shortly following her overdose, she told her longtime business manager Glenn Nordlinger that she wanted to get back into music under the condition that new management would be in place. Having been managed by Phil McIntyre since she was a teenager, Lovato purposefully sought out Scooter Braun, who currently oversees Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, and who had meticulously planned out how he would say no to Lovato because he felt “overwhelmed.”

But once the two sat down together, he knew she not only needed a manager, but she also needed a friend, and Braun was willing to be both. “I am an artist who just overdosed on heroin. I’m kind of a liability,” Lovato admits in the doc while sitting next to Braun. “I don’t know if people are going to want to work with me.”

He was adamant on figuring out what treatments worked and didn’t work for her, who was her support system, and where she was in her recovery process.

Her Overdose Wasn’t the Last Time She Used Heroin

“I wish I could say that the last night that I ever touched heroin was the night of my overdose, but it wasn’t,” Lovato says while setting the record straight about her relapse following a brief pause in the third episode.

After a weeklong intensive trauma retreat, the singer called the same man who had previously given her what she believes to be fentanyl-laced “after-market pills” and later allegedly took advantage of her the night she overdosed. “I wanted to rewrite his choice of violating me. I wanted it now to be my choice,” she declares while facing the camera head on. “And he also had something that I wanted, which were drugs. And yeah, I ended up getting high. I thought, ‘How did I pick up the same drugs that put me in the hospital?’ I was mortified at my decisions.”

She also remembers calling her dealer back and asserting, “No, I’m going to f— you” as a way to take her  power back. But the singer adds it only brought “me back to my knees of begging to God for help.”

Rihanna’s 2009 Assault Made Her Uncomfortable Coming Forward About Her Own

Prior to Dancing With the Devil, Lovato had only briefly hinted at being sexually abused in her 2013 song “Warrior,” which  starts off with the lyric, “This is a story that I have never told.” She told Cosmopolitan for her August 2017 cover that she’ll tell the story behind “Warrior” when she’s ready.

At first, she cites the pictures coming out of Rihanna and Chris Brown’s assault case as making her “very uncomfortable with even more of my story playing out in the press and also maybe people not believing me.” Lovato later begins telling the story of how she lost her virginity “in a rape” as a teenager. And similarly to her situation with the dealer, she called the person back a month after “and tried to make it right by being in control, and all it did was just make me feel worse.” Archival footage of her Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam days and an old interview around that time reveal how aware a young Lovato quickly became of needing to her protect herself in the industry.

“I was a part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting till marriage,” she notes about the pressure she faced in the PG environment as a “little child star role model.” Without naming anyone, the actress adds how difficult it was to see the person who raped her all the time while they never faced any consequences, such as being taken out of the movie they were filming.

It all took a physical toll on her, as her bulimia worsened to the point where she was vomiting blood. In finally disclosing her #MeToo story, Lovato encourages others to speak out, saying, “I’m coming forward about what happened to me because everyone that it happens to should absolutely speak their voice if they can and feel comfortable doing so.”

Ending Her Engagement Changed How She Viewed Her Sobriety

Due to the pandemic, the singer had to film her own interview segments, and she ended up documenting one of her biggest milestones in her life when she got engaged to now ex-fiancé Max Ehrich in July after the couple began dating in May. But a minute after she breaks the happy news during the fourth and final episode, her demeanor switches completely from ecstatic to earnest when discussing how they broke off their engagement and how she hadn’t picked up any hard drugs to cope.

Another minute passes, and self-taped footage from the same night as the previous clip reveals a tearful Lovato expressing how she “missed the person I started quarantining with.” Quarantine not only impacted how she filmed her discussions about her relationship, but also how rapidly it had evolved, leaving her feeling “just as shocked” as the rest of the world after getting to know Ehrich better.

But the impact of her high-profile breakup impacted how she perceived her sobriety. “I’ve learned that it doesn’t work for me to say, ‘I’m never going to do this again,’” she explains of her personal discipline. She expresses her desire to seek relief from smoking marijuana or having a glass of wine, but telling herself those options are completely off the table feels like she’s setting herself up for failure.

After hesitantly admitting she occasionally smokes joints and drinks wine now, Lovato cautions viewers that she’s not endorsing a “one-size-fits-all solution” for recovery after years of being upheld as the “poster child of sobriety.” Elton John, who celebrated 30 years of being sober last summer and hopes Lovato also experiences the “most incredible things” in life while in recovery, puts it simply in the doc that, when discussing sobriety, “moderation doesn’t work.”

But her recovery case manager Charles Cook begs to differ, saying he hopes a takeaway from the docuseries is that no one path to sobriety looks the same for each person. Cook and Lovato also elaborate on the precautions she’s put in place, such as taking the Vivitrol shot, an injection of naltrexone that blocks the opiate receptors and is used to prevent relapses.

“The one slipup that I ever had with those drugs again, the scariest thing to me was picking up heroin and realizing, ‘Wow, this isn’t strong enough anymore.’ Because what I had done the night I overdosed was fentanyl. And that, that’s a whole other beast,” she says while slightly shaking her head. “Realizing the high I wanted would kill me was what I needed to get me clean for good.”

She Was Misdiagnosed With Bipolar Disorder

Lovato has been incredibly vocal about mental health issues ever since the then-18-year-old star revealed to ABC News’ Robin Roberts that she had been diagnosed with bipolar in 2011. Now, a full decade later, she’s revealing that that is thought to have been a misdiagnosis.

“I came out to the public when I found out I was bipolar because I thought that it put a reasoning behind my actions,” she explains, while an old headline pops up about Lovato leaving the Jonas Brothers tour after hitting a backup dancer. “I know now from multiple different doctors that it was not because I was bipolar. And I had to grow up. I had to grow the f— up.”

If you or anyone you know is struggling with mental health and substance abuse disorders, contact Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) by calling 1-800-622-HELP (4357). For those who are experiencing suicidal thoughts and/or distress, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255. People struggling with eating disorders can call the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) Hotline at 1-800-931-2237. If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673). 

The Talk will remain silent for another week.

After going dark on Monday and Tuesday, CBS’ panel series is extending its brief hiatus from live shows until Tuesday, March 23, as the network continues a review stemming from March 10’s heated debate between Sharon Osbourne and Sheryl Underwood. Initially planning to return to live episodes on Wednesday, March 17, the show will stay dark as Osbourne’s defense of Piers Morgan and comments on racism — particularly her confrontation with Underwood, her Black colleague — go under the microscope internally.

A CBS spokesperson sent The Hollywood Reporter the following comment about the extended hiatus Tuesday: “CBS is committed to a diverse, inclusive and respectful workplace across all of our productions. We’re also very mindful of the important concerns expressed and discussions taking place regarding events on The Talk. This includes a process where all voices are heard, claims are investigated and appropriate action is taken where necessary. The show will extend its production hiatus until next Tuesday as we continue to review these issues.”

Fallout for Osbourne (and the show) was swift following the longtime panelist’s teary defense of friend and fellow Brit, Morgan, who stormed off the set of (and ultimately quit) ITV’s Good Morning Britain — which he’d co-hosted since 2015 — after his vitriolic criticism of Meghan Markle was read by most as racist. At one point in her defense of Morgan, Osbourne went on the offense and demanded that Underwood tell her what Morgan had done wrong. “Educate me, tell me when you have heard him say racist things,” Osbourne said. “I very much feel like I’m about to be put in the electric chair because I have a friend, who many people think is a racist, so that makes me a racist?”

Since then, scrutiny has only increased. Original castmember Holly Robinson Peete tweeted that Osbourne had made racist comments about her before her firing, a fact Osbourne disputed in her own Twitter post. On Tuesday, more damningly, journalist Yashar Ali posted a Substack detailing more claims of Osbourne’s racist language on the set of The Talk — including comments from original panelist Leah Remini.

Osbourne is the only original castmember of The Talk to make it to the current 11th season. Peete and Remini both left after the first season. Series creator Sara Gilbert departed at the end of the ninth season, and Julie Chen left during the eighth — as husband and former CBS boss Les Moonves saw his career implode amid multiple allegations of sexual misconduct.

Osbourne’s new publicist, Howard Bragman, issued the following statement Tuesday: “The only thing worse than a disgruntled former employee is a disgruntled former talk show host. For 11 years Sharon has been kind, collegial and friendly with her hosts as evidenced by throwing them parties, inviting them to her home in the U.K. and other gestures of kindness too many to name. Sharon is disappointed but unfazed and hardly surprised by the lies, the recasting of history and the bitterness coming out at this moment. She will survive this, as she always has, and her heart will remain open and good because she refuses to let others take her down. She thanks her family, friends and fans for standing by her and knowing her true nature.”

This article originally appeared in THR.com.

Demi Lovato is no stranger to, in her own words, “dancing with the devil.” She’s been a longtime open book, sharing her struggles with addiction, mental health issues, eating disorders and familial difficulties, walking the fine line between life and death all the way up to her near-fatal July 2018 overdose.

Now, the singer is opening up more than ever, sharing intimate details of her hospitalization and the months of strength since then in her YouTube Originals documentary series, Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil, premiering March 23. To tell a story as heart-wrenching and ultimately inspiring as hers, Lovato called on her friend and director Michael D. Ratner.

“I was humbled to be able to give her a platform to tell her story,” Ratner tells Billboard of the opportunity to work with Lovato on the four-part series, which first debuted at SXSW on Tuesday (March 16). “My responsibility is to give her the space to tell as much of her story and experience as she wants to tell. Ultimately, I found her opening up more and more as the process went on, and the trust was earned. It was in some of those later sit-downs where some of the heavier traumas were unveiled. I think that sometimes I would find those things out before we were rolling, and sometimes I think she actually made the decision to share that stuff because she did feel so comfortable while she was speaking and in the environment we put her in.

“In Demi’s story, her story — it’s all intrinsically tied,” he continues. “Many of the different moments in her life lead to other moments and it’s hard to tell her story completely without sharing all that we did. I think a lot of holes or misinformation is cleared up in this project because she decided to go there. She told me that she was pretty prepared to go deep in 2018 and break the record on a lot that happened there, but I think that she even surprised herself with how comfortable she felt with the process and the way the project was turning out that she wanted to use it as the ultimate catharsis. She wanted to tell the story of her trials and tribulations since that time in 2018, 2019 and all the way up to 2021.”

Ratner, who previously teamed up with YouTube Originals and Justin Bieber for the “Love Yourself” star’s Seasons and Next Chapter docuseries, continually stressed the importance of trust in sharing these vulnerable moments. “It’s just transparency from the get-go, and being really upfront about the goal of trying to share these artists’ truths, and being a really good listener and providing the safe space and platform for them to tell their story,” Ratner suggests as the reason why a number of high-profile artists turn to him to direct their documentaries. “I take pride in the fact that they do trust me with their most intimate moments and ultimately getting their perspective out into the world — and I think that comes through time and transparency and work ethic.

“I try to really study and understand, and put in the time to get to know these people so I can help ultimately share their story with the world,” he adds.

The director certainly accomplished his goal with Lovato, who revealed everything from her brief engagement to Max Ehrich in 2020 and embracing her queer identity, to the sexual abuse she claims she suffered as she was overdosing, and the medical issues she still struggles with as a result of the OD. “I was left with brain damage and I still deal with the effects of that today,” she says at one point in the doc. “I don’t drive a car because of blind spots in my vision. … I had a lot of trouble reading.”

And while seeing someone as outwardly confident as Lovato be so unarmed can be heartbreaking, that’s what makes this docuseries so much more compelling. “My job also, from what I know from [Demi] and what she wanted to get out of this, was not just to make a softball documentary and not just make it a puff piece, but to really ask the hard questions,” Ratner says. “It was her prerogative to share as much of it as she wanted, but that was her goal and her decision and I was there to listen and give her a safe space to talk about that information.”

That “safe space” allowed Lovato to shed the often toxic expectation to be a “role model,” which adds an unnatural amount of pressure to a 28-year-old who has been in the spotlight since she was a teenager — and neglects the more realistic aspects of the human experience.

“Demi and I talked a lot about ‘role model’ and being the poster child for things,” Ratner explains. “I think what we have effectively done here versus previous times in her life — when she made [2017’s] Simply Complicated, she was the poster child for sobriety. And I think that here, while many people are going to talk about her bravery and how many people she’s helping as a result of this documentary and saying that it’s OK to not be OK and you’re not defined by your lowest moments, she’s not saying, ‘I’m the poster child’ for anything. She’s saying, ‘I’m a wildly flawed human being, as we all are. Here is my unique journey and my struggles, and it’s OK for you to talk about your unique journey and struggles.’

“She’s not necessarily claiming to be anything,” he adds. “So nobody after this can be like, ‘Wait, you said you were XYZ!’ She’s not setting herself up for failure. She’s saying, ‘Here I am in my very human capacity’ and hoping that her story helps other people.”

The down-to-earth and honest nature of the series, to Ratner, is what sets it apart from musician-focused films of the past. “When talking about the documentary, people say, ‘I’ve never seen a music documentary like this,’ and I say, ‘That’s right, because it isn’t a music documentary.’ This is a human documentary about a musician and about a musician who’s also a multi-hyphenate and a person,” Ratner shares.

Without giving too much away before more of the public can view it, Ratner reveals that the most moving part of Dancing With the Devil is “the way history has repeated itself, and the way she shares how history repeated itself in her life and in episodes three and four. She talks about some of the repeated trauma that she’s been through and the time and reflection has led her to really have more clarity on how these things impacted her. I think that was a pretty big revelation.”

With a deep breath, Ratner adds, “I direct and produce lots of different types of shows and films — I can juggle a lot at once, but I can say that this project specifically was very hard to think about anything other than Demi and this project because of how heavy it was. Normally after a day on set, I can go meet up for a work dinner or something, but my mind was racing on whatever happened that day because of how heavy it was and it was pretty intense.”

As for why more and more artists are choosing to share their lives through documentaries, Ratner believes it’s all about connection. “It’s very different than being on tour or [releasing an album]. This is a way to really go in and allow the people who think they know you to get to know you a little bit better,” he shares.

Ratner also executive produced the documentary. Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil was produced by Ratner’s OBB Pictures and SB Projects. Scott Ratner, Kfir Goldberg and Miranda Sherman also serve as executive producers for OBB Pictures. Scooter Braun, Allison Kaye and Scott Manson executive produce for SB Projects. Co-executive producers on the project are Andy Mininger and Arlen Konopaki for OBB Pictures, Jen McDaniels, Scott Marcus and James Shin for SB Projects, and Hannah Lux Davis. Marc Ambrose serves as producer.

Watch the trailer below.