For Dove Cameron, a great deal of her life has been in the spotlight. Before she stepped into a recording studio to release her first album, she worked with the Disney Channel on series like Liv and Maddie and the Descendants franchise. That doesn’t include her list of feature films. Always lending her voice to Disney, she eventually branched out, releasing her debut studio album on December 1.
Discussing her LP Alchemical: Volume 1 in an interview for American Songwriter’s December 2023 digital cover story, Cameron stated that the album addresses “trauma in every form,” pulling from abandonment, emotional abuse, and more. Cameron detailed how the emotions of hitting “rock bottom” in 2023 seeped into her writing sessions for the album.
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“Even if you’re in a bad place, you show up because maybe there’s a song there,” she said. “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.”
Dove Cameron Drawing Inspiration From Iconic Artists
With the singer already working on the second part of her album, Cameron admitted to it having an entirely different tone. “I felt like I was writing the two halves in such different headspaces. Like, the first half was really about the ending of something and an entire year of my life and the processing of that that happened,” via Billboard.
[RELATED: Interview: Dove Cameron on Writing the Feminist Anthem “Breakfast”]
While fans will have to wait to hear the new tone on her next project, Cameron teased some of the influences she drew inspiration from with Forbes. “I’m having a big Beatles renaissance right now, big Bowie renaissance, big Iggy Pop renaissance. I think the second half of the album is going be a huge departure.”
Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images for Balmain
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