Dove Cameron Says Revisiting Past Traumas to Write Her Album Was Like 'Emotional Spring Cleaning' (Exclusive)

"I finally felt like if I didn't write about them, I was going to carry them forward with me," says Cameron, whose new project 'Alchemical, Vol. 1' is out now

A lot of life experience has led to Dove Cameron’s two-part debut album Alchemical.

After notching a global hit with the queer anthem “Boyfriend” last year, the 27-year-old musician and actress took time to process and write through various traumatic life events for the emotional first half of the album, Alchemical, Vol. 1, which dropped Friday.

The Emmy-winning star has been a household name for Gen Z and beyond since she rose to fame as a child actor on Disney Channel more than a decade ago. More recently, she’s graduated to more mature on-screen projects like AppleTV+’s Schmigadoon! and the film Vengeance while staking her place in the pop music scene.

Related: Dove Cameron Teases 'Sand' Music Video, Inspired by 'Finding Myself Again' After a Breakup (Exclusive)

Behind the scenes of Cameron’s success story, however, she’s faced hardships that’ve forcibly kept her in touch with life’s harsh realities. In addition to relatable ups and downs in romance and coming to terms with her own queer identity, she experienced the tragic and unforeseen deaths of two close friends and her father between her young childhood and mid-20s.

Cameron, who’s seen a therapist for most of her life, approached writing Alchemical, Vol. 1 by revisiting many harrowing experiences she’s endured to craft the soul-baring, introspective lyrics that accompany her moody alt-pop sound. Love, breakups, self-reflection and grief are all present throughout the eight-track project, a looking glass into her intricate and impressively balanced mind.

The performer recently caught up with PEOPLE about the process of “emotional spring cleaning” that helped her create Alchemical, Vol. 1, how she’s remained grounded post-child-stardom and why she doesn’t like to specify who her songs are about.

Related: Dove Cameron Recalls Feeling 'Incredibly Suicidal,' Talks 'Shame and Stigma' Around Mental Health Issues

Since “Boyfriend” came out in February 2022, you've won two MTV Video Music Awards, an American Music Award and a GLAAD Media Award, among other honors. Does that success make you feel like you’re going in the right direction, or does it create a sense of pressure?

Definitely both. I grew up reading articles about how much pressure people feel when they're writing, when they're releasing albums, when they're doing promo, so I know that that's quite normal, and I've been feeling it a little bit. The best part of this job is definitely connecting with humans all over the world, but it's also the actual making of the thing that you're passionate about. If you're too concerned about this invisible pressure of one-upping yourself or meeting expectations or whatever, you lose that childlike experimentation — the joyful part about this job.

I've been able to pretty much keep that at bay. The only expectation is to create stuff that really resonates with me. But also, it's exciting, the fact that you never know what's going to connect. I think the possibility of things connecting is gorgeous, but I also think the possibility of things not connecting is also educational and gorgeous in its own right. So, I've really been able to hold it really healthily and just charge myself with the responsibility of creating.

You took some time off anything non-music-related over the summer to finish the album, focus on yourself and process grief from a past relationship as well as close deaths you've experienced. What did you learn about yourself from that time in solitude?

This year was a really interesting experience for me because it was almost like I doubled back. Some of these songs are about things that happened 10 years ago. Some of these songs are things that I've never been able to write about. I finally felt like if I didn't write about them, I was going to carry them forward with me. “God's Game,” “Fragile Things,” “Sand,” “Still,” these more melancholic tracks, they're more focused on who I have been previously before “Boyfriend” and “Breakfast” and “We Go Down [Together],” and that was a really interesting exercise.

[Alchemical Vol. 1] is definitely the prequel to where I am now, which is a funny, funny exercise. But I sort of hit a wall early this year with burnout and realizing that I really didn't have a personal life. My friends and family have always had this sense of worry and stress about me. I think, as a Capricorn and as someone who's highly traumatized, I dove into work so hard at such a young age, and I really didn't construct a community, a life or anything outside of my job.

I reached this place, and I think this happens to most people in their 20s, where you have to take stock of all of the things you ignored and revisit, reorient and reorganize them, almost like an emotional spring-cleaning. I had to go into the attic of all of the stuff I hadn't dealt with and go through them and look at them and put it down on paper. It was really, really good for me as a human being.

How did going back into processing past traumas lead you to the better place you’re at today?

I would say that I'm — emotionally — the best I've ever been in my life. We all know, culturally, trauma lives in the body. We all know it sits with you until you're ready to deal with it. It's not like you do spring-cleaning in the mind, and then suddenly you have a smooth brain and none of those things happened. That's not how it works, obviously. Until you incorporate the demons you've been struggling with, the things that you've been refusing to look at, they're actually more present in your life because they have more of a say in the way your days go. You're more easily sent back to a place that you've been trying to avoid.

When I was really doing that intuitive healing work and allowing myself to just be in pain, bleed it out and sift through the flour of my life to make sure there was nothing getting caught in the sifter, I found so much stuff that I didn't realize was in there — and that I didn't want to look at. Through acknowledging those things, which is part of why the album is called Alchemical, it's the experience of alchemy where you take one form of energy and you turn it into something else. You can't do that unless you're actually holding it in your hands and working with it like clay. You can't do that blindfolded or while you're doing 10,000 other things. You have to really, really sit with it.

That was something that previously I hadn't had the time, space or even the desire to do, and that's the beautiful part about getting older and growing up. You reach these impasses in your life where you go, "If I don't do this now, it's never going to happen, and my entire life is going to look like this." Once I did that, it just felt like all my channels were open again. I was writing this first half while I was in that process, which is why it's very melancholic sounding. But now, on the other side, all of the music that I'm writing is super celebratory and very vulnerable in a positive way, and it's just entirely transformed me.

Is there a particular song on the project that felt like a breakthrough moment in revisiting those difficult past experiences?

“God's Game” particularly resonates with me in terms of being able to write about emotional abuse, the experience of being in love with someone who takes over your entire worldview and how easily you can lose yourself to an unhealthy relationship. Like, if I was a home, I was in a relationship with someone who had painted all the walls, gutted out the home and transformed it into something that was entirely reflective of them, not me. I became a projection of this person.

It was really important for me to write that song because I've always wanted to be able to talk about that experience, that toxicity and losing yourself to someone who really is playing God in your life. For them, it's really a game. There's no emotional attachment, and you're just an object for them to be engaging with. I will forever be very, very proud of that song, because it's a difficult thing to talk about in a non-literal way. I really think we found a beautiful way to bring it home and paint the picture.

Between “God's Game” and a song like “Sand,” fans have been speculating who you might be writing about. Obviously, you've had high-profile relationships. Do you care to specify who any of these songs are written about?

No, I don't. Songwriting is such a nonlinear process that sometimes when you're writing about a concept, the entire verse is about one experience in a relationship, and the chorus is inspired by a different relationship, and then the bridge is more about an amalgamation of things that have happened. Some songs I've released have been exactly about a one-hour span experience, and some of them have been about one person in particular, but a lot of the songs on this record are an amalgamation of the last 10 years, a combination of people. I try to stay nonspecific enough while also honoring that as an artist, your life is to put your experience into a song, and people are going to guess. It's OK to have certain specifics in there if it aids the story.

You’ve spent so much time working on your mental health. In that sense, you seem extremely well-adjusted for a former child star. How did you come out of that machine and remain grounded, especially with all the trauma you've experienced?

Funny enough, I think it was the trauma. I feel like I've never ever been two feet in the industry. I've always been one foot in, one foot out, and I've always known this was a very special and specific life experience that is so rare. By the age of 14, I had these big heavy life experiences that punctuated being in the public eye that were entirely personal. Because of that, it kept me tied to knowing that first and foremost, I am a human being. My job is secondary to my human life.

Even when I was only really working, I always felt this thing tying me to the world around me, which was, yes, an immense amount of grief and pain, but also I feel like the more grief I experienced, the greater my capacity for love became. I felt like I was just this big bleeding heart my whole life, and I wanted so badly to connect with people — and there is nothing less connective emotionally than being in the public eye. All I ever wanted was a normal human life, and because I missed out on so much of that with my father passing away and all of these things starting very young, I think I knew intuitively that I craved human connection and emotionality. I was always able to balance the two and know when to walk away.

I actually really attribute these big losses and life experiences to keeping me very grounded, and I'm really grateful for that. In a world where we can't change these huge life events, and we have to give over to the humility of knowing that we are not in control, I don't wish they had happened, but knowing that they did and looking for anything to feel positively about them, I am grateful for that. I'm grateful that it always reminded me of my humanity and the fact that I'm not going to be here for very long, because none of us are.

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

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