Dove Cameron has long been a star. Audiences first met her in the Disney Channel series "Liv and Maddie" — which won her an Emmy thanks to her dual-role duties as twin sisters — followed by her starring role in the wildly popular Disney Channel franchise The Descendants. More recently, she added a GRAMMY nomination to her repertoire thanks to her turn in the Apple TV+ musical parody series, "Schmigadoon!"
But earlier this year, Cameron kicked off a new chapter with the dramatic power-pop anthem "Boyfriend." The song served as a liberating moment for Cameron in part because it touches on her queerness — but perhaps more prominently, it was a re-introduction to the singer and actress the world met nearly 10 years ago.
"I couldn't find my authentic mode of expression until not long ago," she admits to GRAMMY.com. "I felt my whole life I've been making shapes of myself and I knew I felt very trapped, though I didn't know where I was going to go. I didn't know who I was."
"Boyfriend" wasn't Cameron's first step into her career as a pop singer/songwriter — she's released a handful of one-off singles since 2019 — but it was her first that frankly addressed her sexuality. "Ladies first, baby, I insist," she sings. "I could be a better boyfriend than him."
Cameron continued speaking her truth with the provocative follow-up single "Breakfast," which confidently declares "I eat boys like you for breakfast" in the chorus. As she preps her debut EP, she's making it clear that nothing is too raw and real to say in song.
In a vulnerable conversation with GRAMMY.com, Cameron opened up about how baring her soul into this new music has led to her biggest triumph. "The idea of being seen for everything I actually am is heaven to me."
The lyrics to "Boyfriend" lived on your phone long before it ever became anything. So was that just one moment of, "Oh my god, I need to write this down" and then you put it away? Or was that the result of a lot of different moments of you pecking away at the lyrics?
"Boyfriend" came out of a really awful night that I think I'm never going to elaborate on. But it always happens to me — there's a big traumatic event and I'll be wrecked by it for a few days.
A week later, I was sending one of my best girlfriends, [actress] Kiersey Clemons, a voice note about this night I had. She's queer, and we'll talk about the experience of walking around as a queer person in the world quite often.
At that point I was laughing about what had happened and framing it in more colloquial ways — putting it in terms that were more soundbitey and lyrical. That's probably where the first iteration of "Boyfriend" came from. It was me kind of joking with her.
Something important with me in my writing process is taking a huge event, emotion or concept and dissolving it down into a cheeky retelling. I'm big into laughing at my trauma, it's definitely my coping mechanism. I find that things that are highly emotional to me can end up turning into laissez-faire retellings.
You've said the night in question that inspired "Boyfriend" was multidimensional, both positive and negative. So does that mean it was negative at first and then you made it into a positive through turning this difficult night into a song?
It was definitely mostly negative that night. I left in fits of tears and called my best friend saying, "I don't know what to do!" But I'm also able to take myself out of it and ask myself, "There's a reason why this experience is happening — what can I find in it that I'm supposed to receive?"
This time it happened pretty quick after I was done crying and melatonined myself. I was already looking for a seedling of what was going to make me better from that experience. Just like chipping away at a piece of marble to reveal the beautiful statue underneath, I feel that every moment of suffering in my life is meant to carve me out better. I got way more out of that night than I ever thought I was going to.
"Boyfriend" is very raw. You've said the song is "an amalgamation of the feeling of growing up queer." Was there ever a moment when you said, "I don't know if I want to be this honest and vulnerable in my music?"
Well, I think that the answer to that is layered. I definitely think that it was not in my plan to write an intensely queer, broad, somewhat-anthem. I didn't set out to do that and didn't think it was going to be how my music career found its footing.
I'm not thinking how people are going to perceive this. It's a huge gift I've given myself to have tunnel vision and be present.
More than anything, this is something I've tried to communicate before, but I have this deep, deep, deep fear of never being seen for what I actually am. I spent a lot of my life being what I need to be to survive in actual danger and actual traumatic situations, as a young straight-presenting woman in the industry — as a young girl, in terrible relationships, in my family home, in fashion, film, and TV. I felt my whole life I've been making shapes of myself and I knew I felt very trapped, though I didn't know where I was going to go. I didn't know who I was.
The idea of being seen for everything I actually am is heaven to me. It feels intimate, and it feels connected, and it feels like human-on-human life — which is really our whole existence, isn't it?
The idea of being loved by the masses — as society has defined it — is way scarier to me than the idea of being so authentic, and being known for that. Being liked or hated, I'm not as attached to. I just couldn't find my authentic mode of expression until not that long ago.
So no, [being vulnerable] doesn't scare me at all. As a matter of fact, it makes me feel much, much safer. If I died never fully seeing myself or letting other people see me, that would be the greatest tragedy of my life.
I find it interesting that even though you've been releasing music for a couple years now, you're just this year being regarded as a breakout artist with your first pop hit. It seems your biggest success in music so far is a direct result of your vulnerability.
It backed up this feeling (I've always) had of universality in the specifics. I saw a quote about songwriting that talked about how you need to get on the other side of an experience and have clarity about it, otherwise your lyrics are just complaining about a situation. I think that's so true. We're all so overwhelmed with other people's ideas, emotions, energies, judgments and fears that it's hard to tap out of the noise to make something true for you.
I had to go through a serious deep, dark depression — and then a very reclusive mode and dyed my hair dark, and cut myself off from everybody and everything — to figure out what the f— was wrong with me [and] to find what hurt me so much. I had no clue: not even an inkling or heat signature.
But then I really tapped into my own biosphere of everything I was feeling that no one else could point me toward — because we're only going to end up where we're supposed to go. When I was able to do that, my writing became divorced from other people's ideas, opinions and energies. If I hadn't done that, I'd forever be writing from the point of view of the general populace.
I'm constantly asking myself, "Am I writing for me right now? Or am I writing because I know people are going to hear this?" I do think the way to create the best stuff is to step away from the world and then come back when you have something that you think is true to you — which is easier said than done when there are a million voices around you all the time.
When you set out on your music project, you said you were trying to develop a new sound you didn't have a name for. What was the new sound in your head and what were your influences? I recently heard that success comes down to two things: knowing what you want and knowing how to get it, but sometimes knowing what you want is the most difficult thing.
Definitely. Talking to people in the music industry, the one thing everybody asks is "What's your sound, who are your influences?" And I was always kind of frustrated by this. It'd trigger me because I had no good answer.
But I also thought it was good I couldn't point to another artist, because then maybe that meant I had something new to offer. It's difficult to create your own thing and find your own lane. I think I'm still finding it now.
"Boyfriend" is a pretty straight-up pop track with nothing revolutionary. How I described it to ["Boyfriend producer] Evan [Blair] once is that it's almost as if we made a dubstep track, but with horns. I kind of look at a lot of the friction between the blueprint of dubstep — but instead of electronic production, its horns and strings. Add in jazz vocals combined with R&B and pop vocals, and a viewpoint of a lot of rock songs, but without any of the rock instrumentation. So it's a mix of all of these things that don't go together.
When I hear a song like your new single "Breakfast," with its breathy yet powerful vocals, it makes me think of your motif you've talked about of making music from a villain's perspective. Does that influence your delivery then, because at the same time you are an actress. And if you're thinking of yourself as a villain character, are you then sounding vocally like a villain?
There's been a rise in culture in general of identifying with the villain. I alway grew up loving the villains. I used to go to school in fangs and weird s—, which, looking back, was totally just a normal, natural expression for me, but also very much isolated me. But I was a darker kid who liked darker things.
In my town, everybody was playing soccer. I was a total loser. I kind of grew up not having many friends and being an outsider. Once I found theater, I thought, "Oh, there's more of us."
The binary-obsessed world that we're in — with gender, politics and the black-and-white of it all — it all leaves very little room to empathize with the other. I think that the reason the world is so attracted to the villain these days is that — when you remove a couple of the more theatrical elements from most villains in every movie — they're just an antagonist who has been highly traumatized.
With our post-collective trauma in our world, we all find ourselves feeling like the villain compared to the protagonist, who is so boring, vanilla and milquetoast. No one can relate to the protagonist anymore. I started using that as my descriptor of my sound a couple years ago and no one really knew what I was talking about.
In terms of my vocal quality, for a long time I was doing musical theater, and I spent so much time living very puritan in order to keep my voice in a certain tenor. By the end of every show I did, I was on intense vocal rest every day and I'd speak through typing things out and a robot would say it for me. It was just so monastic and restrictive that I'd rebel afterwards by blowing my voice out and drinking a bunch of coffee and staying up really late. It gave me this kind of this incredibly raspy, smokey tone that I'd try to train myself out of.
But at the end of the day it was like, "Why don't I lean into this, because this is how my voice sounds?" I love listening to jazz and vocals with loads of texture and history. That's really what a smokey tone is: it's vocal damage.
When Evan and I started recording, we were huge fans of super intimate vocals. When you hear all the rasp and the tone, you're hearing air, and it feels highly sexy. It's like someone singing to you in bed.
If I do literally one thing in my career, it's going to be to try to build intimacy between human beings. Music is a great way to do that.
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