"Sober" - Demi Lovato

"Sober" is a song that hit me like a ton of bricks. It's a huge amount of emotion in a song and a huge song for her as a person, as well as for her fans. I think her voice is incredible and it grows stronger with each and every album she puts out. In this instance, I love that she wants to spread a message that everyone was beautiful. I love the fight she has and her strength.

One of the strongest things she's done is release this—in terms of her courage and her vocal range.

The mass of brutal honesty and emotion throughout the entire thing leaves me breathless. If anyone knows how to come up with a truthful, honest ballad in this day and age, it's gonna be Demi. She's so open and gives you the harsh truth while you're sat wishing that you could give her a hug.

But first impressions?

WOW. How vulnerable she is and how real she is shakes me and I felt as if was invading her privacy in a way by listening to this. My hairs stood up, my eyes welled up, my spine tingled and despite the current heatwave, I was shivering.

It begins with her first apology for saying goodbye—I've seen some say it's her saying goodbye to sobriety which is heartbreaking, but it's a theory that I feel is right. We then hear her asking to be woken up when "the shakes are gone" and when her "cold sweats disappear"—both being symptoms of relapse into alcohol and/or drug abuse, hinting further that this is her saying she's relapsed and is no longer sober. There's the element of denial in her request to be woken up when she 'reappears'—she doesn't want to believe it's her, and she knows that this isn't like her. This is no longer who she is, but she's fallen back down the hole.

Her almost pleading with herself to stop and to not do it, saying that "It's only, when I'm [she's] lonely." This is honest about her trigger that leads her into relapsing, saying that it happens when she's alone and feels lonely.

The chorus is the thing that brings it home and hurts me the most: I actually cried when she was apologizing to her dad; after how open she is about the relationship she had with him? Plus, after the echoes and hints at the relationship they had in "For The Love Of a Daughter" that kills me. In that way, in the talk of his addiction and her own, it has echoes of Amy Winehouse's "What is it About Men" in the fact it's about history repeating itself and she sees the elements and a "Freudian fate". Not directly similar, but something I picked up on.

Apologizing to her mum and her friends who've "never left me [her], we've been down this road before," it's a song packed with apologies, emotion, and regret, and there's no talk of pinning the blame on someone else; she's hard on herself and saying it's down to her and the trigger of being lonely, but she also wants to get help and make it right.

The second verse is where I had to stop listening the first time around because it hit me like a ton of bricks and I was sat in uni, so sobbing into a Mac wouldn't have been the wisest thing to do. The apology to her future love the "man who left my bed" for making love the way she did in her head, hinting that it wasn't her in the right frame of mind, and she regrets past loves. It could hint at misplaced passion and, linking to the fact that she's said she's lonely, that she missed signs or fell in order to not be lonely.

My favorite thing other than the rawness is the fact that there's not too much going on. There's nothing dramatic; just her and her vocals and she kills it.

The promises at the end to get help, that she'll get better, I wanted to hug her. She did so well to get so far, but recovery from anything is difficult; whether it be from alcoholism, drug addiction, self-harm, or eating disorders.

I feel like she needs to know that there is no need to apologize for falling at a hurdle; we're human and we fall sometimes. The important thing is we recognize that we've fallen and we get back up and start the race again.

I've seen so many people saying they relate to the song, and while it breaks my heart, it's as if this one song has caused a ripple of bravery for people to share their stories in however they feel that it relates to them. That is a powerful thing to cause.