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The Singles Bar: Demi Lovato, “Skyscraper”

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Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 07/12/2011 at 11:17 AM Reviews

The Popdust Files: demi lovato, skyscraper

We could’ve filled an entire day with posts about Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper.” Last week there were announcements winnowing through the air. Yesterday morning, there were announcements too weighty to winnow. Yesterday afternoon, there was a video teaser with a very somber Demi and a very active wind machine. This morning, there’s an entire song! If real skyscrapers went up this quickly, the earth’s surface would be entirely covered in concrete by August.

It’s safe to say, though, that “Skyscraper” doesn’t sound much like our predictions and definitely not like our hopes. We’re surprisingly OK with this! Listen below (pitch-shifted, we know, but not by much):

Co-writer Kerli’s almost certainly here for the job because of Toby Gad’s connections (see for yourself) unless Demi’s a really big Tarja Turunen fan or something, which is actually sorta plausible. “Skyscraper” doesn’t sound much like her stuff, nor really much like Toby Gad’s stuff, nor really like R&B or rock, nor anything on the radio except off in Christina Perri’s niche.

What “Skyscraper” sounds like is a ballad, but thankfully, there’s life to it. The song’s almost completely vocal-driven. This isn’t just to say Lovato’s vocals are raw–although they are, all the cracks and quavers left in. It’s that the drama reaches up to about the hundredth floor, but it’s not the instrumentation’s doing. Its piano line swells and recedes through the same few notes, and the beat and faint strings and backing vocals–which hardly count as instrumentation, anyway–peak at about 70% of their potential even on the bridge. There are about forty ways the producers could have ratcheted up the sound for cheap drama, but Demi’s voice was enough anyway.

In fact, it’s more than enough–lots of people are probably quite stunned at this point that Demi can sing like this. She blasts away the paper/skyscraper rhyme and the vague lyrics that, if they’re about her personal struggle, are kind of like the versions of tabloid stories that filter down to newspaper briefs months later. This is how you sing a ballad. And if Demi Lovato seemed an odd choice to remind us, hopefully that won’t be the case for long.

POPDUST SAYS:

Rating: 3.0/5 (1 vote cast)