Singer and actress Dove Cameron is setting the stage for her forthcoming sophomore studio album following the release of her debut LP Alchemical: Vol. 1 in 2023. The first taste of the project, lead single “Too Much,” arrived in February, and the follow-up single “French Girls” is out now.
The song is a cheeky allusion to one of Kate Winslet’s famous lines from Titanic and signals a more traditional pop music direction for Cameron’s next project. “Paint me like one of your French girls / In emeralds and curls / I give myself over to you / I wanna be remembered / Be yours forever / Make me your whole world, your muse,” she sings on the track.
While it might appear to be a superficial message, Cameron noted that there’s a much deeper meaning to be gleaned.
“There’s a huge intersection between pain, heartbreak, joy and camp and levity. And that’s where we found ourselves in ‘French Girls.’ The melodrama of being a muse for a sculptor or a painter,” Cameron told Billboard. “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.”
“I’m definitely not talking entirely about myself,” she continued. “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?”
Thinking about her place as a woman in the constantly moving music machine prompted the creation of such a song.
“I wanted to explore my feelings around the tension between the joys of connection on a mass scale and the vulnerability that comes with that. The artifice and the intimacy and the surrealism of fame, the people who I look up to, who I consider icons, and where I fit within that, or if I even do,” she further explained, per Uproxx. “‘French Girls’ is a love letter to the romance of my relationship with the world around me, which, like any real relationship, has always been and will always be complex.”
Cameron’s sophomore studio album is due out later this year.
