INTERVIEW: Dove Cameron on her breakthrough single 'Boyfriend': "You get one life and you may as well do things full out to the max until you fall over."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Kristen Jan Wong
Dove Cameron is one of those artists that can turn her hand to anything, and when she does it is always mind-blowingly good. She first came to the world’s attention as an actress in the Disney series Liv and Maddie for which she won a Daytime Emmy award, also releasing a soundtrack album for the series.
Amongst multiple other acting roles, she has also had a main role in the hugely successful Descendants film series, with the first soundtrack album featuring Cameron hitting number 1 on the US charts. Alongside her soundtrack work she has also established a career as a standalone, mainstream pop artist since 2019 releasing a number of singles.
In February this year she launched a new era of music with the single ‘Boyfriend’. It is a stunningly good track that mixes moody electronic pop with smoky jazz and an orchestral grandeur that is breathtaking in its scope. Lyrically the song sees Cameron embracing her true self and falling for someone at a party, persuading them “I would be a better boyfriend than him…plus all my clothes would fit.” The song has become her first major solo chart hit, reaching the top 10 in the UK and the top 20 in Australia, a country that now streams her music on Spotify more than anywhere else in the world.
The video is appropriately cinematic and features Cameron, in a room of faceless dancers, locking eyes with a woman across the room. They are soon making out in a phone box, and an open top car speeding through a motorway tunnel. It is a rush to watch and it is dripping with dark, sensual imagery.
Cameron says of the single “In writing “Boyfriend,” I feel like I finally found my sound, my perspective and myself in a way I wasn’t sure I ever would.” There is definitely a confidence, a maturity and assurance in the way she proudly delivers ‘Boyfriend’, which augurs well for future releases. Cameron is definitely a supremely talented artist who is going to be so exciting to watch in the next few years. We recently caught up with her to find out more about ‘Boyfriend’ and this next chapter in her career.
Dove, we are such fans of your work and I really appreciate you joining us today.
I really appreciate your time. Truly, it's such an honour to be speaking to you. Thank you for taking the time.
How are you feeling about the release of the absolutely impeccable ‘Boyfriend’?
I'm feeling fucking phenomenal! It's really, really mind blowing. It’s highlighted where my imposter syndrome lives and the corners of my mind where I'm limiting myself and self hating saying ‘something like this is never gonna happen’. Things like that! It's really wild to experience this in a career at any point, but also just as a human being I'm kind of mind fucked. It's really interesting!
That's such a wonderful thing to hear from someone that just continues to do wonderful things. There's quite often this perception that pop stars are nonchalant about these things, ‘yeah, just drop that, yeah, that was pretty cool.’ And to hear you've got impostor syndrome, and you're wildly excited about ‘Boyfriend’s success is really inspiring.
I definitely think there's this sort of thing in celebrity culture that we should be chill about certain things, but I don't know one person that actually lives like that. Everybody's an extreme geek, a fan of other artists and everybody's like 12 years old, you know. It's so nice to be able to just share human moments with people on a massive scale. That's a mistake that people make with having a large scale level of communication with people is they hide more. Shouldn't we be more human if we're gonna have a big megaphone?
Absolutely, and nobody's really that cool! I must just say, this jam is amazing, and I'm just loving that little hook at the end of the chorus ‘plus all my clothes would fit’, it is just the sweetest punch in this very heady electric rock purr of a tune. Can you talk me through the creation of this gorgeous song?
It was really a Frankenstein amalgamation of a bunch of things. I had had this night in New York, and I came home and I went on tour and I had written about this night furiously in my journal. It was a very colourful night, there were some amazing things and terrible things, like one of those ‘tell us a crazy story’ nights. I went on tour and then my label was like ‘time to go write the EP’ and the very first day I sat down in the studio to write the EP, which is always expected to be like 100 songs and only going to like four of them, the very first song {I wrote] was ‘Boyfriend’. I didn't have any sort of critical eye on it, I wasn't creating it for anybody else. It was me and my producer pal Evan, very intimate, shoes were off, you know. And so when I was like, ‘plus all my clothes would fit’ we were just trying all these cheeky little lines and things that I said offhanded conversationally. I think the reason they sound so comedic and almost like a little wink is because that's the kind of conversation you have with your friends, right? They were never really intended to be heard by anyone, which is why it's really changed my creative process. The things that you write just to please yourself are going to be what ended up resonating with a larger group of people, which is the opposite to how most people, myself included, create.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there. A lot of people don't necessarily get that, if they ever do, until much later in life. Where do you think your confidence in song creation comes from? It’s such a delicate line to walk with so much honesty.
My honest answer is that I've had so much loss, and I've had such a close relationship with death, I have an attitude about most things of ‘this just doesn't scare me’. There are very few things in the world that could rattle me at this point. And that has has allowed me to create from a level of ‘I just don't care if this is gonna go over well, or be well received’. You get one life, you're definitely going to die and you may as well do things full out to the max until you fall over.
That's amazing. And you're so right, you're just left in a state of staring it down, provoking it, ‘go on then…!’ .
Exactly! It's so interesting. If there is one thing found in tragedy, it's the levity of what there still is. It's like ‘I'm going to fucking go for it’. It's a pretty great kind of permission slip, you know.
That's gorgeous. Society has always had this very difficult time separating the art from the artist, particularly ones they have grown up with. Was there ever any trepidation for you saying ‘no, this is what I'm gonna do, I can't keep playing a character’?
It was an entirely natural progression, while also being something that I was aware of the whole time. I was always aware while I was on Disney, that my job was to represent the company on the channel and outside of it. They never said that explicitly, it was a wonderful relationship I had with them, but I was also a very self aware 15 year old girl, I knew exactly what was expected of me. Did I also have tattoos that full time? Yes. Was I also dating women off and on that whole time? Yes. It was never a big secret, you just don't bring that stuff to work. The one thing that is confusing to people is when they have so much access to you, they feel this close interpersonal relationship with you. That's part of the gig, right? As I was coming into my adulthood, I was very aware of ‘you can take a hard left and really scare people and isolate a lot of people, or you can just slowly let people realise who you are organically and naturally’. Then when ‘Boyfriend’ happened, it was so overnight, it wasn't some big decision that I had made. It was just ‘oh, I guess this is this is how it's gonna happen, this is how people are going to realise that I've been doing something else for a while now.’
There's just something absolutely lovely about that because you can see how absolutely successful that disclosure was because people have just eaten ‘Boyfriend’ up and massively so. But your audience are also growing up in real time with you, and what you've done is created a space also for them to find themselves and sometimes that gets taken for granted.
That's totally true. If you're thinking of yourself asa product, it's never going to resonate. You can't force something. But if you think of yourself as a human being, and you are okay with people misunderstanding who you are, you then hope that over time the people who are growing with you, it can naturally amalgamate in a nice way. There's definitely a worry that maybe that's never gonna happen. But for me that was always a risk I was willing to take.
Beautiful! Lastly, before I have to leave you, we have ‘Boyfriend’ out and it's an amazing sound. Can you tell me what else you've got coming up, you mentioned an EP might be on the way?
I've said that a few times now, which I'm not sure the label’s happy with or not! I wrote this song called ‘Breakfast’, which I'm really excited about. I wrote it like three weeks ago. The label is pretty confident that's going to be my next release, which is so great because my dream is just to release music constantly and for it to be something I just wrote so it is still relevant to my life, and I'm not sick of it. I then have two movies coming out, I have this movie called Good Mourning with Machine Gun Kelly, Megan Fox and Pete Davidson and that should be really fun. And then I have a movie called Vengeance with BJ Novak, Ashton Kutcher and Issa Rae. And then hopefully I'm going to delve into my debut album and a pretty sizeable tour in the fall!
‘Boyfriend’ is out now via Disrupter Records/Columbia Records/Sony Music. You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Dove Cameron you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
