Dove Cameron on the Inspirations Behind New Song ‘French Girls’ (Including ‘Titanic’)
Written by djfrosty on May 2, 2025
Dove Cameron is back with “French Girls,” an espresso shot of electro-pop that finds her continuing to explore moody, campy dance-pop that won’t quit.
“There’s a huge intersection between pain, heartbreak, joy and camp and levity. And that’s where we found ourselves in ‘French Girls,’” Cameron tells Billboard. “The melodrama of being a muse for a sculptor or a painter. There’s something so painfully romantic and also constricting about that. In ‘French Girls,’ the thing that I was really obsessed with was this self-sacrificing mania about being a muse that is not healthy.”
Aside from the song being inspired by her love for Paris and Parisian museums, she confirms that the chorus is a reference to Titanic, specifically the scene where Rose asks Jack to sketch her. And yes, she knows she’s technically misquoting the movie. “The public remembers it differently than what it was: in the movie, it’s ‘draw me like one of your French girls.’ But ‘draw me’ just didn’t sing as well as ‘paint me’.” Given that a lot of people “collectively remember it” as “paint me like one of your French girls” anyway, she took the creative license to tweak the line for her song.
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“I’m definitely not talking entirely about myself,” she explains of the song. “I’m talking about all of the women in the industry that are considered these great, larger-than-life personalities, these Helen of Troy people that we remember in history as these icons of beauty and art who can also be the most tragic figures. In ‘French Girls,’ it was just that (question of), ‘How far do we go to sacrifice ourselves for our art and for our love of what we do and for the people who love what we do?’ Are we interconnected? What is this amalgamation of things that we’re creating together as the audience and the person on the stage?”
Speaking of the stage, it was just announced that Dove Cameron will serve as the opening act on several dates of Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism Tour in the U.K. and Ireland. You can find those dates below.
June 20, 2025 – Wembley Stadium – London, England
June 21, 2025 – Wembley Stadium – London, England
June 24, 2025 – Anfield Stadium – Liverpool, UK
June 25, 2025 – Anfield Stadium – Liverpool, UK
June 27, 2025 – Aviva Stadium – Dublin, Ireland