Actress and singer/songwriter Dove Cameron compares her career to a spotlight that constantly changes color based on the filter that’s placed over it. “I think that the through line is that the person writing the music sees the world through a certain lens, and through that lens, many characters can come through,” she hypothesizes in an interview for American Songwriter’s December 2023 digital cover story.
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Much like the color-changing spotlight, Cameron adapts to the character of the songs she writes and sings, her passion for music stemming from childhood. Her father was a classically trained pianist who played jazz and piano music around the house; her mother is a writer, so it’s no surprise Cameron was raised in an environment that fostered creativity. “I was always a music-oriented person,” she observes. “I grew up with two modes of creating that I think really influenced me as a creative, as a songwriter. I had people who encouraged me to see the world through that lens.”
The 27-year-old says she’s been writing poetry and music for as long as she can remember, and frequently asked for CDs, records, and books of poetry for Christmas. “The whole architecture of my childhood was oriented around that,” she remarks of music. “I felt like it was a natural thing.” The young Cameron started making music around the age of 8 when she got her first electric guitar. Around the same time, she learned to play piano and started to tinker with melodies. She took the poetry she was writing and set it to music. “I naturally am very expressive,” she observes. “I naturally have a flair for storytelling.”
Knowing that she had an equal passion for music and film, her life took a major detour when she pursued a career in acting, launching into stardom in 2013 at the age of 17 with a dual starring role as the titular characters in the Disney Channel series, Liv and Maddie, which earned her a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Performer in Children’s Programming. She was simultaneously starring in the Disney film series, Descendants. “I wanted to make film and I knew I wanted to make music, and it was really like, ‘Let’s see which one I naturally excel at, what I gravitate towards. Let’s just start experimenting,’” she describes of her process.
Amid her full-throttle acting career, Cameron was still recording songs, ranging from covers of Christina Aguilera and Imagine Dragons to performing as part of the duo The Girl and the Dreamcatcher alongside her Liv and Maddie co-star Ryan McCartan. She also showed off her singing chops in the role of Amber Von Tussle in Hairspray Live! on NBC, and has appeared in Dumplin’ on Netflix and the ABC series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Her career started heading toward music in 2018 when she signed a deal with Columbia Records’ imprint Disruptor Records.
“It finally became obvious to me that was something that was incredibly important to me in my life and opened me up to the person that I felt I always was, but could never fully explore up until then,” she expresses of music. Though she’s been immersed in music since childhood, Cameron says she didn’t identify as a songwriter until she started writing her smash 2022 hit, “Boyfriend.”
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The song was inspired by an “emotional” night, the details of which Cameron says she may take to the grave. “That was still one of the wildest nights of my life,” she hints. “This night was so traumatizing. There has to be a fucking purpose as to why all of those different things would align in this way to be so fucked up.”
“Boyfriend” was released in February 2022 after Cameron and it charted worldwide, peaking inside the Top 10 on the Billboard Adult Top 40 and Mainstream Top 40 charts, and the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. Despite the harrowing experience that informed the song, Cameron says the song that resulted from it led to a massive breakthrough. “It changed my life, and if it hadn’t happened, I never would have the music career that I do now,” she asserts. “It allowed me to step into the fullness of who I am and my identity and my sexuality in a way that I might have never.”
Translating her experiences and emotions into song is a role she fully embraces with the first half of her debut album, Alchemical: Volume 1, out now. The eight-track endeavor finds Cameron processing years of emotional trauma from past relationships that she’s now ready to bring to the surface through song. She doesn’t sugarcoat when stating that the album addresses “trauma in every form,” from loss to emotional abuse and abandonment. Revealing she “hit rock bottom” in 2023, she would often show up to writing sessions with trusted confidants Connor McDonough, Riley McDonough, and Ryan Daly in shambles. But it was exactly that pain that she and her collaborators chose to lean into when writing. “Even if you’re in a bad place, you show up because maybe there’s a song there,” she says of her approach. “I really hit a wall with what I was able to conceal from myself or from other people, and it became a necessity for me to explore these themes. It wasn’t an act of bravery as much as it was an act of survival.”
“The first session we ever did with Dove we somehow spent nine hours just talking about music and a wide range of topics. We found instant chemistry and comfort in conversation and we knew right then that creating together would be no different,” Daly and the McDonoughs tell American Songwriter in a joint statement. “Dove curates an environment where no subject is too wild to touch on and the production has no limits. When a song is free to be whatever it is calling for, there are endless possibilities for where it may lead. Many of the ideas were sparked from poetry as Dove’s journal is a world of its own, with hundreds of themes and concepts, allowing us to run in any direction at any time. With Dove, we are always looking forward to seeing where we will end up next.”
The singer points to “FRAGILE THINGS” and “God’s Game” as two of the album’s most vulnerable offerings, describing the former as a waltz that sounds “misleadingly romantic.” I’m still glad you came to visit / Love is like a house of fragile things / Where hearts can be broken / As easy as antiques / And now there’s glass all shattered at my feet / What we built together / You left it’s memory, she sings over a delightful piano melody in the chorus. “It sounds like a light lift, but for me, the subject matter was quite a heavy lift,” she explains. “It was something that I was sort of gaslighting myself into thinking that I wasn’t needing to think about or feel or deal with.”
The haunting “God’s Games” finds Cameron processing the emotional abuse she endured at the hands of a narcissistic lover, as evidenced through such lyrics as: Learned to see the world through your eyes / I know it’s a scary place / ‘Cause you told me so / Love of my life would you lie? / Are you only trying to hurt me babe / So you can be my saving grace? “The feeling of someone changing your brain chemistry to the point that you don’t even know who you are, you have no self-worth anymore, these are themes that were very difficult for me to write about, especially because I’ve done so much work to not be that person anymore,” she shares. “To revisit them and go back and feel those feelings again, it’s not an easy ask of yourself, but it’s also important in terms of letting them go.”
Comparing songwriting to a sacred practice, the superstar says that writing Alchemical: Volume 1 provided healing and growth, so much so that she is now starting to write about her father, who passed away in 2011, as well as her friend and fellow actor Cameron Boyce, who tragically died in 2019 at the age of 20 from a seizure. “It was so difficult to synthesize into words because losing someone in that way, you can’t even really fully grasp it,” she remarks of writing about the death of loved ones. “There are things that you feel like you can’t even say out loud because it would break you and then you say it and then on the other side of that is so much freedom and you can let go of these things that were holding you hostage. There’s something really human about songwriting that feels very spiritual. I find it to be incredibly healing.”
Looking ahead to the future, Cameron is starting to work on part two of the album. With her newfound sense of healing and freedom, the multifaceted star can feel songs coming to her, knowing that they will appear to her when they’re meant to be written. “I feel like there are songs in the ether that as we develop, we can make out the shape of and grab,” she expresses. “I know they’re on my path. I know that I am going to stumble upon them and suddenly be able to put them into words. I’m feeling like the more life I live—the more time I give myself, the more room to breathe, the more I set boundaries—the songs manifest and the feelings find themselves in words, and I am able to be the person, the artist, that I’ve always wanted to be.”
Photo Credit: Sophie Webster / Courtesy of Sunshine Sachs Morgan & Lylis
