Dove Cameron needed to express her “personhood” on her new album.
The 27-year-old singer-and-actress has just released her debut LP ‘Alchemical: Volume 1’ and while she spent a long period of time being “really avoidant” to ballads and sad songs, she ultimately decided they were necessary when expressing her life experiences in her music.
She told Billboard magazine: “I always said that I never wanted to release any sad music or ballads, because I was really avoidant for a long time, like, ‘Everything’s happy! Everything’s so amazing!’ But I was not happy.
“I decided if I was going to be a person, right? Your personhood and your life has to come before everything. If I was ever going to become the person I was going to be — and music is so important to me — I had to integrate what has happened so far and I have to write for me first and foremost.”
Dove teased the upcoming second part to the project is a lot more fun and “sexy” and though the two albums are part of the same venture, she felt very differently working on each.
She said: “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.
“And then there was a very stark kind of sonic page turn when it came to the sort of next musical phase that I stepped into. It just kind of ended up making sense to split it.”
The ‘Boyfriend’ singer recently revealed the influences that may shape the second record.
She told Forbes magazine: “I’m having a big Beatles renaissance right now, big [David] Bowie renaissance, big Iggy Pop renaissance. I think the second half of the album is going be a huge departure.”