Dove Cameron On Her New Album & Her Relationship With Fame

Dove Cameron is retiring from bleach. “I just don’t feel like myself as a blonde,” she announces, tossing a frosty, braided ponytail over her shoulder — remnants of her last big dye job earlier this year. “It was my whole life. Isn’t that such a funny thing, hair color and identity?”

The pop star has been dyeing her hair since she was 8 years old. Back then, her parents’ jewelry business frequently took the family to India, where a young Cameron experimented with henna and got her first taste of how changing your exterior could change your interior state. By age 17, she was a Disney Channel star, playing twins, Parent Trap-style, on Liv and Maddie, which meant years of buttery platinum. (She won a Daytime Emmy for the role in 2018.) But a few years ago, just before she had a breakout music moment with her viral 2022 hit “Boyfriend,” Cameron went dark. The villainous bad-b*tch music she was making needed a look to match. But what is dyeing your hair near-black, really, if not a statement about blondness?

When we meet on a drizzly afternoon in May, on the rooftop of Perch, a swanky bar in downtown Los Angeles, her now-cool-brown hair is parted perfectly down the middle like a da Vinci muse. Her porcelain features are mostly makeup-free, save for sharp flecks of burgundy liner at the corners of her eyes. Emoting with her tattooed hands, she talks a mile a minute, even before ordering a latte.

“I have the ‘nothing’ color,” she says as we first sit down. “It’s not brown, it’s not blonde. It’s like that gray European [color]. It lifts so easily, but then when it goes platinum it’s like string.” And life’s too short to move through it with flat hair. “I can’t keep it up. I’m not strong enough anymore. I really lost that in my 20s. But anyway — hi!”

It’s a good time for Cameron to reintroduce herself. If the success stories of 2024 — Charli, Chappell, Sabrina — have taught us anything, it’s that you never know when the world is finally going to catch up to the goods you’re serving. At 29, Cameron has already packed in multiple careers’ worth of work into her resume: She can be a big-IP franchise player (Disney’s Descendants film series, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) or go full musical-theater diva (Off-Broadway’s Clueless, The Musical, NBC’s Hairspray Live!, Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon!). Her transition from Disney starlet to grown-up pop powerhouse was remarkably seamless. Cameron’s brooding 2022 single “Boyfriend” — with a delicious hook like “I could be a better boyfriend than him” — anointed Cameron the poster girl for chaotic bisexual heroines and became a hit both on TikTok and the Billboard charts.

“It didn’t feel as ballsy at the time as it is looking back,” says Cameron, stirring the steam out of her coffee. “Everyone that I had a crush on growing up, they turned out to be queer! So I didn’t think it was going to be an earth-shattering thing. It was less like, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m queer.’ It was more the sentiment of being like, ‘F*ck your boyfriend!’” The feeling, it turned out, resonated widely. “How many times a day are we all thinking, ‘That guy f*cking blows! Put me in, coach!’”

“I was suddenly listening to what I grew up listening to — Marina, Robyn, Gaga, Lana — and going, ‘This would slap today.’”

But the newfound attention the song brought shook her, and though she speaks nonchalantly with me about the song’s queerness, back then, she was battling with her own identity behind the scenes, as she confessed in a tear-filled 2022 Instagram post.

“I’ve been struggling lately with the concept of self, my inner relationship to who I know myself to be and my outer perceivable self who i feel i have never known but other people seem to,” she wrote. “I’ve been covering mirrors lately. I’ve been feeling wrong in clothing that used to make me feel beautiful lately. I’ve been crying a lot lately, sometimes terrorized by my identity and image…. Sexuality and performative gender norms, societal rewards and identity are really throwing me for a loop.”

So, just when her career was ascending to a new level, she pulled back. “I [have] to really microdose my presence in the industry, because I just don’t flourish where I’m constantly on camera anymore,” she says now. “Maybe I did it too much when I was younger, but I think I’ve finally gotten a handle on it.”

“The industry was like this beautiful extended make-believe. Five days out of the week it got to be my fake life. I spent less time being me, and that became addictive.”

She rallied to release her first body of work, 2023’s Alchemical: Volume 1, but scrapped plans for a second installment and doesn’t consider the project her proper musical introduction. “Alchemical: Volume 1 was a direct reflection of how watery and lost and dissonant I felt from the world around me,” Cameron says. “It wasn’t truly my debut album, but it was very true for me at the time.”

Now, when she opens for Dua Lipa on a string of U.K. and Ireland stadium dates later this month, she’ll be unveiling a bolder new version of herself. This time, she’ll be performing songs from an upcoming album she considers her real debut: a set of brazen, maximalista pop anthems — including her newest single, “Romeo,” out June 27 — about taking up space, knowing your worth, and surrendering to love, thanks in part to her romance with Italian rock star Damiano David, frontman of Eurovision-winning band Måneskin. It’s all a testament to how Cameron built herself back up from rock bottom. “I keep checking my pulse like, ‘Am I good? Am I ready to be back in the industry in the public eye? Is this going OK?’” she says. “‘Am I spiraling yet?’ And so far, no.”

When Cameron hit her breaking point in early 2022, it stopped her in her tracks — hard. “I didn’t go out. I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t have relationships. I didn’t see my friends more than a few times,” she says. “I didn’t work and just holed up in my house and tried to figure out how I was going to move forward, if I could move forward in the industry.” For a while, she thought about quitting Hollywood entirely. To get to the other side, Cameron says, “I had to really take stock of all of the things that I had been neglecting.”

She’d been running for a long time. “When I was entering in the industry, it was a particularly tumultuous time for my family and personal life,” says Cameron, who was born Chloe Celeste Hosterman and grew up outside of Seattle. Her parents divorced when she was 13, and she and her mom headed south to start over in Burbank, California. “The industry was like this beautiful extended make-believe — in the same way that when things are really bad, you can always dive into your favorite book.” On set, you have “someone who was your mom and your dad and your best friend and your boyfriend, and you’re like, ‘Wow, wouldn’t this be amazing if this was real life?’”

“Five days out of the week it got to be my fake life,” she continues. “I spent less time being me, and that became addictive. I was like, ‘This is so much better than what’s going on in my personal life.’”

“There’s an eternal quality to modern-day celebrity: ‘I own you and now I can look at you whenever I want.’”

Cameron fit the stereotype of the precocious child actor; she remembers getting rejected for a would-be killer role on a show from writer-producer Karyn Usher (Prison Break, One Tree Hill) because a casting director thought 13-year-old Cameron “[read] like she’s 30.”

Her teen years brought a quick succession of tragedy and heartache. When she was 15, her father died by suicide. That’s when she dropped her given name and rechristened herself Dove, the pet name her father had long affectionately called her. Meanwhile, Cameron was subsumed by two back-to-back, four-year-long relationships — she was engaged to her Liv and Maddie castmate Ryan McCartan, then dated actor Thomas Doherty — and struggled with the grief over the untimely death of her Descendants co-star Cameron Boyce in 2019.

“In this sort of classic The Body Keeps The Score sense, the score was just too high,” she says, “and my body just decided to knock me on my feet. It was like, ‘We’re done.’”

The months that followed moved slowly. “It was a lot of crying and it was a lot of feeling my way through the dark,” she says. “And one day, it was so bizarre: Like a light switch, I just was like, ‘I think I’m done for now.’ All of that stored emotion has to be bled out. And I just never f*cking had the time.”

When Cameron showed up at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards, she didn’t know yet that night would change her life. It was there that she first crossed paths with her future boyfriend, Damiano David, who also happened to be her competition: Cameron beat out Måneskin for the Best New Artist trophy. (She dedicated her win to “all of the queer kids out there who don’t feel that they can take up space and inhabit the fullness of who they are.”) When she and David reconnected at the same awards show the following September, David invited her to his band’s concert at Madison Square Garden a few days later. One hang led to another, led to another. “I went [into the studio] to write this record in December, and it was the first two weeks that I was seriously dating my partner,” Cameron says. By the spring of 2024, Cameron and David appeared arm in arm wearing Diesel at the Met Gala.

“The thing about love is it’s just, like, f*cking inspiring,” she says. “I was enjoying this campy feminine moment that I was in, where I was suddenly someone’s girlfriend. I was very healed, very in love, feeling very safe.” Those big, bright feelings even steered her away from the subterranean sounds of Alchemical and back to a “recession-pop, big radio banger sound.”

“I was suddenly listening to what I grew up listening to: Marina, Robyn, Gaga, Lana,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Wait a minute. What happened to all that music that I rejected, that I grew up with, that I was formed by?’ I was listening to that music again going, ‘This would slap today. This would absolutely rule the radio. It’s all I want to consume.’”

Her collaborators remember her coming into the studio hot. “Dove’s an incredible writer,” says songwriter Victoria Zaro, who’s also worked with Tate McRae. “She’d show up with full pages of poetry that would end up forming the core of a lot of songs. She had a really clear vision from the start that was so inspiring.” Madison Love, who previously co-wrote hits for Lady Gaga and Ava Max, recalls marveling at her “perfectly written stanzas” and scrambling to keep up with Cameron’s free-flowing ideas. Her lyrics are “so raw, so personal yet so relatable,” Love says. “[I kept saying] ‘I die for that’ while trying to scribe everything she says out loud, asking for her to repeat herself so I don’t miss a thing.”

The “recession pop” feel they were chasing is nowhere more present than “Too Much,” Cameron’s full-throated, four-on-the-floor single from earlier this year. Addressing a past partner who once tried to dull her shine, she seals the chorus with a snarl: “If you say I’m too much, baby, go find less!”

“I was always so intimidated by her, but when you talk to her, you realize she’s just a down-to-earth, wacky theatre kid,” says fellow Disney star Meg Donnelly.

“While I was finding these new celebratory levels, I was still unearthing sh*t that was still very present,” she says. “It really took me a long time to understand what the f*ck my early 20s were” — and “Too Much” was born from that reckoning. “When ‘Too Much’ came out, [people] were like, ‘Oh, but this relationship was so long ago,’” she says. “Yeah — and I finally now realize what that was.”

Although Cameron and David stay out of each other’s business for the most part — they split time between Cameron’s home in LA and David’s home in Rome — Cameron lent her vocal talents to David’s song “Zombie Lady,” a cut off his new debut solo album, Funny Little Fears, which came out in May. “Promoting [records] at the same time is weird,” she says. “There’s no reason why we’d be releasing at the exact same time other than pure coincidence. There are certain times of the year that are good and bad for releases. Once November hits, even October, you’re f*cked! It’s Christmas music. There’s no chance of anyone listening to your sh*t!”

Cameron says her new album is split between two categories: love songs and f*ck-you songs, although sometimes it can be hard to tell which is which. Her recent single “French Girls” might sound like the former — “Dirty pictures on the road / Got you on the next flight home / Arch my back like the Triomphe / And cover me in liquid gold” — but is actually about her relationship with the public eye.

“I was obsessed with this idea of everybody in line with their pens and papers and crying eyes, never knowing what I sacrificed,” she says. “What’s the POV of the Mona Lisa? Or the true diva that is Venus [de Milo] with her arms missing? These muses are forever trapped in these pieces of iconography.”

Cameron whips out her arm to show me a tattoo that reads, in fine script: “DO IT FOR APHRODITE.” She empathizes deeply with the Greek goddess of love, who represented great power and yet was simultaneously objectified.

“Aphrodite became this beacon of femininity that was a huge problem for the women in Greece,” says Cameron, a museum-loving art history buff in her spare time. “The men would [tell women], ‘Hey, cover up,’ but then they’d go see [statues of] naked Aphrodite, and they’d be like, ‘So f*cking hot!’ And her nipples were worn away from men touching them. I was just like, ‘Justice for Aphrodite!’”

“I know these are metaphors,” she adds, “but there’s an idea that great art is linked to what is modern celebrity, in the sense that everybody is for consuming: ‘I own you and now I can look at you whenever I want.’ There’s a sort of eternal quality to modern-day celebrity, even though it feels like it’s moving a million miles an hour. Being a female in the industry right now, I wanted to write a song for them.”

“The thing about love is it’s just, like, f*cking inspiring. I was enjoying this campy feminine moment where I was suddenly someone’s girlfriend.”

Cameron’s clear-eyed approach to celebrity resonates with actor and singer Meg Donnelly, who cut her teeth on hit Disney properties like the Zombies film series and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.

“Watching how she navigates social media and is just herself, not conforming to what people are saying, is really something I look up to,” says Donnelly. She reconnected with Cameron at a recent Nylon event — where they talked for two hours, and shared their own fears of being suspended in the amber of their child stardom.

“Because I was a kid on a kid’s network, I’m put in this weird position of not being able to grow up because people see you as such,” says Donnelly. “She encouraged me to turn off all the noise. I was always so intimidated by her, but when you talk to her, you realize she’s just a down-to-earth, wacky theatre kid like me.”

Cameron completed the album last June in Los Angeles, just days before shooting her next TV project in Montreal — which also happens to be her most adventurous role to date. Nearly 15 years after getting passed over for a Karyn Usher project, the producer personally reached out to Cameron to gauge her interest in the upcoming Amazon Prime erotic thriller 56 Days, based on the Catherine Ryan Howard novel of the same name. “She called me and said, ‘I have this crazy script and I’ve never forgotten about you. Would you read it?’” Cameron recalls. “And I was like, ‘What in the 1970s Hollywood magic is that?’”

Cameron will star alongside Avan Jogia as a couple whose hot-and-heavy romance spirals into a murder case. It’s a juicy role, yet Cameron, having established herself on the family-friendly Disney Channel, had some reservations about the nude scenes required for it. Incidentally, it took a beach day in Italy with David for Cameron to relax about filming them.

“My partner is European and has way less hang-ups on the purity complex than Americans do,” Cameron says. “I went to the beach with him during a break while filming, and all the girls were taking their tops off. He was like, ‘Nobody’s going to be staring at you. You’re totally safe. If you want to, then you’re free to do that.’ Not that he was giving me permission, but he was like, ‘You’ve never done this before. It’s normal.’”

The experience helped her “lose my shame around my own sort of ingrained weird thing about nudity, which I didn’t think I had,” says Cameron, who also credits the directors and intimacy coordinators with helping her feel comfortable. “I think it actually helped me fast-forward in my evolution.”

And it crystallized something she’s taking with her in this next chapter. “My rule that I live by is the thing that you are the most afraid of, the place you are most afraid to go,” she says, “is the very place you need to go next in order to get to the next level.”

Top Image Credit: Buck Mason Top, Roberto Coin rings (index finger and thumb)