Dove Cameron Shares Her Experience On Unreciprocated Love
This exclusive interview with Hypebae digs deeper into the artist’s story behind her latest single, “Sand”, along with a look at the poem the lyrics were derived from.
Dove Cameron drops her latest single off of the highly anticipated debut album, Alchemical: Vol. 1. Titled “Sand”, the track reflects on unreciprocated love as it introduces a more raw and personal version of the artist that the public has yet to hear. Following the success of her hits like “Boyfriend”, “Breakfast”, “Bad Idea” and the most recent “Lethal Woman”, listeners have been exposed to a hard, unbreakable and almost villain-like Dove Cameron. “Sand” is showing those who don’t know her that she, too, can feel emotional, soft and heartbroken.
Read along as Hypebae had a chat with the artist to break down the track, talk about poetry and reflect on emotions.
How are you feeling? Your debut album is dropping in less than a month and you’ve now also released an extremely vulnerable song.
I’m definitely feeling more vulnerable than ever. This first half of the album is sort of focused on my 2022/2023 experience of the fall-out of a very important relationship and facing a lot of the stuff I was attempting not to look at for most of my career and life – loss, pain, grief and losing people romantically or losing people that have passed,
I love “Boyfriend” and I love “Breakfast” and that’s why they’re part of the album – they feel true. However, I realized, while i was writing the record, that I didn’t want to start thinking of myself as this impenetrable, villain-soundscape person that was afraid to acknowledge what got them to this point.
How did the concept “Sand” come about?
“Sand” is about a boy who I loved very, very much. I consider him to definitely be one of the loves of my life and who I thought I was going to spend my life with. It was an overwhelming experience of having that seemingly perfect relationship end so suddenly without any warning and how quickly it turned from very real and physical to completely slipping through my fingers overnight.
“I saw the end when we began / You couldn’t love the way I can” tells how I decided to jump into the relationship anyway while knowing that it couldn’t possibly end well because I was so in love with someone who couldn’t see me as deeply as I could see them and probably could never see me as deeply as I saw them from the very beginning, but knowing that I had no other choice when I met them but to love them and give myself to them fully and see it through.
It felt like strapping into a car that I knew eventually was going to run out of gas. It didn’t have the capacity to go all the way, but I loved him so much that it consumed me. I couldn’t not buckle myself in even though I knew that when it ends, a lot of parts of me will end as well. When it finally happened, as much as I was shocked and had really made myself believe in what this relationship could be, I also wasn’t shocked because I had told myself from the beginning that it was probably going to happen.
It was a really wild experience acknowledging that no matter how much you give yourself to someone, if they’re not capable of giving themselves to you in that same way, it can be love but it can’t be the great love of your life. As a really sensitive and romantic person, it was really hard for me to process and to also acknowledge that I still had so much love for him and thinking of where that love goes when the relationship ends.
He was seeing me as more of an object than a person and I was seeing him for the fullness of who he was.
With understanding your emotions, did “Sand” start off as lyrics first or music?
“Sand” was really important for me to write because it came from a poem. Most of my tracks come from poems that I wrote in very desolate times of my life that can later be put into a melody. “Sand” was a pretty direct translation, this is what I wrote in February 2023:
There are less grains of sand in every desert on earth than I have thoughts of you
There are more grains of sand in a single hourglass than your thoughts of me
As you place me in your bedside drawer
Somewhere where she will not see
I realized I had been the sort of person for him that was occupying a space of this great love story and archetype of the woman he’s going to spent the rest of his life with but not necessarily someone he wanted to treat well in the meantime. He was seeing me as more of an object than a person and I was seeing him for the fullness of who he was. He was hiding me and saving me for later. There was pain in realizing that this person can’t see how painful that is for you and feeling like you don’t fully have personal autonomy. It was hard for me to see because when you love someone, you see the best sides of them right? You want to believe that they are the person that you feel they are. “Sand” was sort of my coming to terms with the fact that I had been falling in love with someone that wasn’t bad to me, but was bad for me and that was really hard to face. This track was me putting that to bed and acknowledging all the things I didn’t want to acknowledge.
Like the first line in the track, “What’s worse? Being wanted but not loved or loved but not wanted?” I knew he loved me so much, but feeling like he could only love the part of you that he could see is something I think women deal with a lot. Not acknowledging the full humanity of your partners is really difficult to deal with when you’re so busy holding the space for the full humanity of your partner.
With breakups from public relationships, people end up piecing things together or at least, trying to. Are you afraid to release a story that is so honest and allow space for people to know your truth?
I was. I think that I spent a lot of my early recording career really focused on things that felt celebratory, maybe disconnected from my humanity and things that I felt comfortable sharing and that nobody could really infer anything from. It felt like I was hiding behind a thick wall of glass that only lets people see so much because I really am very vulnerable and super sensitive.
I feel like a lot of people see me and think I’m really guarded. It’s so funny because I always wear this big black coat and huge sunnies and big black boots and people always think I look so mean. I think I do that because I am so sensitive that it’s my protection and bubble from the world around me so I don’t fall apart all the time. I think with this record, I just decided that if I’m going to be the artist that I’m going to be moving forward, I have to double back after everything that happened last year with “Boyfriend” and “Breakfast” and sort of give context to the person that I am and everything that happened that people kind of already know but don’t really know the emotional experience of.
I’m not in the business of ever trying to harm someone or throw someone under the bus.
I gave myself permission to not be afraid to talk about these things. I was non specific enough that people can infer what they want to infer and guess what they want to guess, but I’m not in the business of ever trying to harm someone or throw someone under the bus. I’m just giving myself the permission to live in the fullness of my own humanity which is something I’ve never really done before. I was talking to a lot of other artists and people who work with artists and they told me that if I’m going to do this, I have to learn that this is my job. It’s my job to be vulnerable on behalf of other people and talk about these stories so they can find themselves in them. That’s the ask.
When I was writing this record, I finally let myself do that. I don’t think it will ever not be nerve-racking, but I also know that it is done with so much love and so much empathy for the other party and trying to see all the sides while also not trying to diminish my experience of it.
