TV/Film

“Basically, I disappeared from the industry for almost two years,” Dove Cameron tells Billboard over a Zoom call, half-laughing. For patient fans of the singer-actor (as well as the less-than-patient ones clamoring for new music in the comments section of her Instagram), the wait is finally over.
Cameron unleashes “Too Much” on Friday (Feb. 21), a danceable kiss-off to a less-than-supportive lover. “If you say I’m too much/ Baby, go find less,” Cameron scoffs over throbbing synths and a dark, pounding beat, evoking the camp-drenched classics of Lady Gaga’s early years. “I’m sending warm regards/ And a box of your things in a black car.”

Though sonically divergent from her Billboard Hot 100 top 20 hit “Boyfriend,” “Too Much” is similarly inspired by a real-life incident of a guy being a dick. Several years ago, after a “beautiful night” out with a bunch of friends, Cameron and her then-partner got into a car. “I was like, ‘Wasn’t that such a nice night?’ And he said, ‘You know, people like you better when you talk less.’” At the time, Cameron panicked, thinking “Oh my God, did I totally read that wrong? Maybe everybody hates me.”

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In that sense, “Too Much” is a bit of a retcon re-do for Cameron, giving her the chance to say today what she wishes she could have told him at the time. “I had a realization one day that it’s not my job to make myself smaller to fit into a shape that you’re more comfortable holding,” she muses. “I just hope that anyone who’s young and struggling with feeling like they are too huge, too big wherever they go, they would hear this.”

The singer-actor says her break from the industry “churn,” during which she took the time for therapy and some serious “digging and excavation” into her personal pain and depression, helped give her the needed perspective to craft her next musical chapter — which will not be a sequel to 2023’s Alchemical: Volume 1. “I’m in such a different place in my life,” Cameron explains. “At this point in my life, I feel so, so seen and so loved, especially by my all my friends and my current partner.”

Cameron and Måneskin frontman Damiano David have been dating since at least Feb. 2024, and she says the relationship helped reorient her life. “We met, and it was just like, ‘This is exactly the path, and this makes sense. This person is going to be very important in my life in some way.’ And I started to find new sort of inspiration and step into myself in a way that I had never really done before,” Cameron says. David, who is currently promoting his own solo music apart from the Italian rock band, even inspired one of the songs she recorded during her recent “nine-to-five, five-days-a-week” studio sessions.

Although it’s hardly lighthearted, frothy pop, Cameron’s new material finds her dipping a toe into dance music, a genre she previously thought would be “incongruous” with her personality. “I didn’t think I could make happy music as a previously unhappy person, and this record was really healing for me in that way,” she says. “I just granted myself permission to remove all the judgments that I had around pop music and dance music,” she says, citing artists like Lady Gaga, Marina and Robyn as touchstones for her. “I’m having more fun than ever.”

Cameron also branched out and cleared another creative hurdle on the set of her latest acting project, an upcoming psychosexual thriller for Amazon Prime. “[Any acting project] has to have a challenge, and it sent me into a little bit of an anxiety crash because there’s nudity involved. I had always known that was something I wanted to tackle,” she explains. “If there’s anything I feel like I can’t do, then I feel like I have to do it in order to get to the next level of my own evolution. I was excited to prove myself wrong…. I basically just went into it blindly, super terrified, but knowing that it was the right thing to do, and very excited.”

While the project, based on the book 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard, doesn’t have a release date yet, Cameron is eager for people to see it. “Oh girl, I’m begging. I’m banging down the Amazon door,” she laughs. “I say ‘yes’ to very few acting projects lately, simply because it takes so long to get an album done and off the ground and mixed and mastered and all that, but this was very different and special to me. The script was so strong; I love a concept based on a novel because there’s so much source material to look at; and the character, Ciara, is incredible. She’s a dream character to play.”