Dove Cameron is performing at Sunday night’s American Music Awards, and she’s also nominated in the category of Best New Artist — even though she technically released her debut single in 2015.  But Dove’s fine with being thought of as a new artist, because she says she basically thinks of herself as a new person as well.

“I think that it’s interesting to watch people kind of embrace me as a new artist….I also think that it’s interesting psychologically, because I think that I didn’t find myself as an artist until this year,” she tells ABC Audio.

“I really didn’t find myself as an artist — and as a human — until really, I wrote ‘Boyfriend,"” she says of her queer anthem, which was completely unlike anything she’d done before. “And then it was so obvious. Everything that I had been doing before, in retrospect, it was like, ‘Oh, that wasn’t for me. That was because I thought I had to be that."”

Dove says it’s “wild” to not only be accepted as a new artist, but also be accepted by the LGBTQ community, after coming out in the past year.

“It was really organic, but it just happened all at once,” Dove notes, adding, “When you start to find yourself in a real way, which I’m still doing…it’s like a kind of an exponential snowball effect of like, “Oh! Oh! Oh! Everything makes sense now.”

Finding herself seems to have worked out well for Dove: When she appeared on The Kelly Clarkson Show on Thursday, Kelly surprised her with an RIAA Platinum plaque commemorating the sale of more than one million copies sold of “Boyfriend.” 

“I was so excited when we found out you were getting it,” said Kelly. “I was like, ‘I wanna give it to her!"”

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