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Demi Lovato is madly in love, and she wants the whole world to know. On the \u201cIt\u2019s Not That Deep\u201d album and tour \u2014 which stopped by United Center on Friday \u2014 it\u2019s clear the pop star is in her honeymoon phase with Jordan Lutes (aka Jutes), her husband of nearly a year, parading around endorphin-filled material like the equivalent of couples who Instagram everything. In her case, the first kiss, who will haunt who if they die first and TMI about what they do in Joshua Tree.<\/p>\n
The love fest all came gushing out Friday night, just a week after Jutes crashed the stage in New York, where the couple performed their wedding song, Goo Goo Dolls\u2019 \u201cIris.\u201d There were no cute appearances like this on Friday in Chicago; instead, the 100-minute show was populated by sultry dance numbers for her latest single, \u201cLow Rise Jeans,\u201d and R-rated club bangers like \u201cFast,\u201d all packed in with enough innuendo to go over the heads of anyone still clinging to Lovato\u2019s more innocuous Disney days.<\/p>\n
Now 33, Lovato owes nothing to her child star past. But she\u2019s been channeling it lately anyway, reuniting with Joe Jonas onstage and posting backstage pics with Selena Gomez in the Disney epicenter of Orlando. She even offered to pull out a \u201cCamp Rock\u201d number at United Center that got a surprising rumble of applause from the largely millennial crowd.<\/p>\n
The tease came during the \u201csurprise song\u201d segment of the night when one fan got to pick a performance from a former era, choosing from a bag of numbered dry cleaning tickets that matched Lovato\u2019s coordinating past looks on a clothing rack onstage (the winner was a throwback to \u201cGet Back,\u201d Lovato\u2019s first single from 2008). The theme didn\u2019t totally land as Lovato never changed into any of the outfits. Nor did the cheeky \u201cwe heart our customers\u201d tote bags at the merch stand that bore no connective tissue to the show itself, stylized like a dark industrial corridor with rolling metal garage doors that Lovato and five dancers popped through in a slapdash attempt at stage design.<\/p>\n
Lovato\u2019s nostalgia pangs felt bigger than mere substance, though, akin to Justin Bieber\u2019s powerful reclaiming of the past at Coachella recently. In her latest material, Lovato is reuniting with her original pop roots after a number of years as the runaway bride of the genre. It\u2019s an about-face from four years ago, on the 2022 Holy Fvck Tour, after she held a funeral for her pop career and announced the birth of her rock era, even nabbing Alice Cooper\u2019s Nita Strauss for the run.<\/p>\n
This time she had no live band at all, and while the pop backbone suited her well, the visuals and choreography were heavy on been-there, done-that pop tropes: the has-been stripper chair routine for \u201cJoshua Tree\u201d or the carbon copy catwalk strutting. Most off-putting of all, when Lovato started the night with the electro-pop menage a trois of \u201cFast,\u201d \u201cKiss\u201d and \u201cFrequency,\u201d it felt like a Brat Summer redux as her long jet black hair, sunglasses, a black one-piece and heeled boots looked like the spitting image of Charli. It just didn\u2019t feel like \u2026 her.<\/p>\n