Dove Cameron Talks 'Remember Me,' Messy Love Songs, And Evolving Beyond Disney

Dove Cameron was around 12 years old whenever she realized she didn't really like a lot of popular love songs.


"I felt like I was the only girl on the planet who'd nothing in normal with a Taylor Swift song," Cameron recalls. "'Love Story' was big any time While I was growing up, and every girl around me resonated with her so much. I really remember strongly feeling like I'm never going to be that girl. I was like, 'What the fuck is wrong with me?'"


It doesn't come as a surprise, then, that the singer-actress prefers writing about the raw and occasionally ugly side of being in love. Once Cameron launched her music career last year, she did so with the one-two punch of "Bloodshot" and "Waste," two decidedly un-sappy relationship songs. The same goes for her newest release, the moody and atmospheric "Remember Me," which arrived on Friday (April 10) alongside a fittingly cinematic lyric video.


"Everything that's cute is also really, terribly ugly in a lot of cases, and love is the ultimate example of that," Cameron told MTV News about her approach to writing love songs. "I need that to be reflected in the music I create. The ugly will be there, whether you pay attention to it or not, and also you could as well write songs about it."


On "Remember Me," Cameron paints a picture of an enthusiastic relationship, filling the verses with imagery of moonlit PDA, karaoke, and photo booth photographs. At the same time, she's anticipating the end of it all and asking her partner to, "Please remember me like this / Pretty and delicate / 'Cause things get ugly way also quick / And now we're just so brilliant The message of the self-described "villainy, quick-burning romance," according to Cameron, is, "time's ticking, so appreciate me as I am now."


"I feel really good about 'Remember Me' [because] you do get transported somewhere; I feel like it's a rainy night in Tokyo or New York," she mentioned. "The sun's just coming up and you've been out all night on a bender. I love [the lyric] 'No shoes, dancing around your living room / Pulling off my t-shirt, putting on a show for you,' because it's very sexy and youthful. It feels very much like the dark, teenage-dream love story that people like me habitually dream about."


"Remember Me" is essentially two years old; it was one of the opening songs the 24-year-old wrote and recorded as she started to work on her own music. It wasn't routinely meant to be a teamwork, she mentioned, yet whenever rising rapper Bia sent in a verse for it earlier this year, Cameron mentioned the song finally clicked for her.


"Her vocal excellent happens to be such a fucking match for the song," she mentioned of her collaborator. As soon as I heard her rasp, I was so sold immediately on her. She fits the fantasy of the song, and I can't think about it without the feature now."


"Remember Me" marks the initial group effort in Cameron's arsenal, and that's fully intentional — it was critical to her that her sound not get colored by anybody else as she started to release her own music and introduce herself as an artist. Because, as she points out, a lot of people already have a pretty good idea about who she is — thanks to her years starring in Disney Streams mega-popular Descendants franchise — and that perception is probably incorrect.


"I know that basically the full world associates me with Disney Channel. It's an interesting thing to navigate because I can understand why the world has a certain image of me, however I didn't really understand how strict those parameters were up until I had totally grown out of those she explained. "Then, I attempted to show my authentic self and people were like, 'No, no, no. What are you doing? She's gone off the rails.' It's a very hard thing for people to accept you as anything other than their idea of you in their head."


Her music is already helping to dismantle that image. Soon after "Bloodshot" and "Waste," Cameron released the rock-leaning "Out of Touch," and also because the confident "So Good," which was produced by Ariel Rechtshaid and co-written by Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter. "Remember Me" only perpetuates her developments. And while Cameron has never imagined her work with Disney to be a limiting or negative experience, she's excited about the possibility to open herself up and present herself in ways that fans haven't seen yet.


"It's been a really interesting time for me to begin doing music because I think there's a disconnect between my fan base and my authentic expression, especially because folks are very opinionated about Disney Channel and around the people they grew up watching," she mentioned. "There's a disconnect between the people who I think would listen to my music and who they think I am. I do think that music is an excellent tool for changing that, hopefully."


it may be a slow burn to get there, yet Cameron is fine with that — she doesn't shy away from the tough and messy stuff, immediately after all.