Songfacts®:

• A singer telling their crush they could be a better boyfriend/girlfriend than their current partner is a common theme in pop music. The twist here is that Dove Cameron is addressing another woman who is dating a man.
  
  I don't need to tell you twice
  All the ways he can't suffice
  If I could give you some advice
  I would leave with me tonight
  
  Cameron identifies as queer and has had relationships with both boys and girls. Here, she wants to be this person's girlfriend.
• As an actress, Dove Cameron is best known for her starring role as Liv/Maddie Rooney on the Disney Channel series Liv and Maddie. Her discography also includes several Disney projects, most successfully reaching the US Top 40 with "Rotten to the Core," recorded with Sofia Carson, Cameron Boyce and Booboo Stewart for the TV film Descendants. This is Cameron's first non-soundtrack song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100.
• Cameron wrote the song with:
  
  The track's producer Evan Blair. The Toronto native's other credits include Nessa Barrett's "I Hope Ur Miserable Until Ur Dead" and "Counting Crimes."
  
  Ballad singer and songwriter Delacey (Halsey's "Without Me," Zara Larsson's "Ruin My Life").
  
  Los Angeles singer-songwriter Skyler Stonestreet. Her resumé includes hit songs for Dua Lipa ("IDGAF") and Ariana Grande & Justin Bieber ("Stuck With U").
• Cameron said the song is more true to herself than anything else she'd previously composed. "In writing 'Boyfriend,' I feel like I finally found my sound, my perspective and myself in a way I wasn't sure I ever would," she explained. "I am so immensely happy to have this song and this part of me out in the world."
• "Boyfriend" came from Cameron wanting to create the sound that she saw in her head. As the singer explained to Official Charts, she sent Evan Blair a selection of video clips, art and poetry, as she wasn't hearing what she wanted in other music. Once they sat down to write an actual song, "Boyfriend" fell out.
• At the suggestion of her label, Cameron posted an unfinished demo of "Boyfriend" to TikTok as a sound in December 2021. After completing the song she uploaded a snippet, which went viral, so she released "Boyfriend" as a single on February 11, 2022.
• Dove Cameron penned "Boyfriend" the day after she'd come off a tour, so she was writing from a perspective of freedom. As Cameron explained to Billboard, she started telling her co-writers the story of "this crazy night" she'd had a fortnight before. And in the middle of recounting her tale, Cameron casually said something like, "I could be a better boyfriend than this guy." Her writing team responded, "wait, is this a good hook?"
• Lauren Sick directed the music video, which finds Cameron connecting with a woman at a nightclub. "I wanted this story to be an actual clear love story where it didn't feel male-gazey and it didn't feel objectifying," the singer told People. "And it felt like these two powerhouse equal women were finding each other in this world. And there was this magical spark there."
• Cameron won for Best New Artist at the 2022 MTV Video Music Awards. In her speech, she thanked "all the queer kids out there that don't think they can take up space and inhabit the fullness of who they are. Thank you for getting an overtly queer song onto mainstream radio."
• "Boyfriend" was a result of Cameron's label pushing the actress/singer to work on some music. "I had just done a super small black box theater tour where I was just sort of meeting my fans, traveling around, sort of figuring out what it means to perform live. We ended, my voice was shot and the very next day, my label was like, 'You have to start working on your album,'" she shared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. "So we got into the studio immediately, and we wrote 'Boyfriend' in two hours, and was like, 'This is bad.' I recorded it in 20 minutes and we just put it away. I didn't really think anything of it, and then it turned out to be the thing that gave me a surprise second career."