Demi Lovato is embracing freedom in a new interview, telling Entertainment Weekly about how taking off her engagement ring instantly felt right.
Lovato called off her two-month engagement to ex-fiancé Max Ehrich in September (they were dating for six months prior). The “Dancing With the Devil” singer showed off her massive diamond ring in July during a beachside proposal, but in her latest interview, she showed that her bare fingers were proof she can take matters into her own hands.
“Also, the size of that ring, it made it really real. The second it was off, I was like, ‘You know what? I’m good. I don’t need that.’ I just don’t need an object on my finger to make me feel like I’ve got my sh– together,” she said. “It looks like stability, but it doesn’t mean that it is. And I don’t actually grow through stability. I find that I like living not in chaos or crisis, but in fluidity. It’s not [being] stuck and stagnant in an ideal or a tradition that was placed upon us by the patriarchy.”
While Lovato was hosting the 2020 E! People’s Choice Awards in November, Lovato joked, “So I did what everyone else did: I went into lockdown mode and got engaged.” The joke didn’t go over well with Ehrich, who accused her of “exploiting our breakup for clout” in the comments section of one of her Instagram posts debuting her blond haircut. In one of the songs from her upcoming album Dancing With the Devil… The Art of Starting Over titled “15 Minutes,” Lovato flips the script on Ehrich. “Good riddance — you got your 15 minutes,” she sings on what EW describes as a “savagely upbeat banger.”
“I really had myself fooled, because it was the safe and expected thing,” Lovato told the publication. “Obviously I cared deeply about the person, but there was something inside of me that was like, ‘I have to prove to the world that I’m okay.’ Now that I’m not engaged or married and I’m okay, I’m like, ‘Wow. Isn’t that so much more empowering?’ It’s not this false sense of security.”
Justin Tranter, one of the songwriters involved on Dancing, broke down “15 Minutes” for EW and said the song was written during a weeklong COVID-safe songwriting camp in Malibu, where Lovato would rotate through rooms in the rented mansion of different teams of producers and writers. When Demi heard a scratch vocal of the song, she “just started sobbing. It was really emotional, and really something that Demi needed to do and say.”
