There is a specific kind of courage involved in putting this one back on the turntable — or in your case, pulling it up in the app — because you remember buying it half-ironically and loving it completely, and that tension has never quite resolved.
The Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga soundtrack landed in 2020, attached to a Will Ferrell comedy that had no business being this emotionally sincere. The film surprised people. The music surprised them more. And Demi Lovato’s contribution — a single track, “Jaja Ding Dong,” buried in a medley, then a proper moment-stealing turn in the “Song-Along” sequence — arrived so casually that most people didn’t catch what was actually happening.
What You Actually Heard the First Time
You heard a joke. That’s fine. That’s what it looked like.
What you missed was the room. The “Song-Along” scene was recorded live on set at an actual party sequence, with Will Ferrell, Rachel McAdams, and a cast of European pop stars singing together in a barn-like space — not a studio stage. The reverb isn’t manufactured. The slight unevenness in the voices is real people in a real room feeding off each other, and Demi Lovato cuts through all of it with a voice that, in 2020, was doing things technically that most contemporary pop singers simply cannot do.
Her chest-to-head register break at the climax of that sequence is not Auto-Tuned smooth. It cracks slightly, intentionally, and it’s the most honest three seconds on the soundtrack.
The Deeper Record
Stripped of the film, the full soundtrack — assembled by producers Savan Kotecha and Rickard Göransson, who have between them written for One Direction, Ariana Grande, and The Weeknd — reads as a surprisingly rigorous survey of Eurovision’s sonic history.
Kotecha grew up in Sweden watching Eurovision with the kind of reverence that American kids reserved for the Super Bowl halftime show. That context matters. The pastiche here is affectionate, not condescending. “Volcano Man” lands like a lost Abba demo from the sessions between Voulez-Vous and Super Trouper. The strings are live. The handclaps are not quantized. Someone made a decision to let the tempo breathe slightly on the choruses, and that decision cost someone an argument in the control room, and it was the right call.
Göransson’s production on the ballad sequences has a midrange warmth that streaming compression tends to flatten. This is the album that rewards a proper listen through something that actually resolves the midrange — not because it’s audiophile material, but because the vocal arrangements stack four and five parts and those inner voices are doing harmonic work that the TV mix just buries.
Put it on loud enough that the room pressurizes slightly. You’ll hear the background vocalists in the “Song-Along” finding each other, note by note, like people at a party who’ve had just enough wine to stop being self-conscious.
Lovato doesn’t carry the whole record — that was never the assignment. But the restraint in her featured moments, especially compared to the maximalist thing she was doing on Tell Me You Love Me, suggests she understood the assignment exactly. She’s singing to serve a scene, not a streaming chart, and the result is one of the most unguarded performances in her catalog.
The joke was always real. That’s what you missed.