When it rains, it pours. For Missy Higgins, it’s bucketing down right now.
The beloved singer-songwriter is, right now, steering several massive, and moving, career vessels. All interconnecting.
The first of those, the 20th anniversary of her breakthrough debut 2004 album The Sound of White, which originally logged seven weeks at #1 on the ARIA Chart and is now 12-times platinum certified. That recording is supported with a major national jaunt, her biggest in nearly 20 years.
Most of the 80,000-plus tickets for ‘The Second Act Tour’ were “snapped up within minutes,” according to Frontier Touring, which is producing the months-long trek. The 40-date run has since been extended with multiple encore dates.
Then, on September 6th, the release of The Second Act (via EMI Australia), her first full-length release in six years.
And on November 20th, Higgins will be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, during a special ceremony at the ARIAs, held for the third consecutive year at the Sydney’s Hordern Pavilion.
It’s a patch so purple, the late Prince would want a piece of it.
“It’s a really crazy year. Some of it is coincidence, some of it on purpose,” she tells Rolling Stone AU/NZ over Zoom from her home in Victoria.
“I generally take really big breaks in between albums and then when I come back, I’m immersed in the process. I’m very obsessed with it, and it becomes my entire life for a while. It’s like the ‘birth, death, rebirth’ circle. Going around and around.”
The Second Act has been described as part two of The Sound of White, though it’s “not a sequel in any sort of planned way,” Higgins admits. And no, “there was no nudge from outside for me to make this album. It was very self-motivated.”
Higgins has matured from the angsty kid who penned The Sound of White. Parenthood will do that. Both albums do, however, share similar origins. “They’re both very confessional,” she explains, “to such an extent that none of my other albums are.”
Those records include her second album from 2007, On a Clear Night, which also went to #1, as did 2012’s The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle. Oz (from 2014) and Solastalgia (2018) both cracked the top three in Australia. Higgins’ career took her, for a time, to the United States, where On a Clear Night (#193) and The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle (#83) cracked the Billboard 200.
None of the material from those earlier studio recordings were sourced from the overwhelming pain Higgins, now 41 and a mother of two, endured as her marriage collapsed.
“I was in such a tricky place, I was going through a real reckoning,” she reflects. “I was having a real existential crisis. I was trying to figure out who I was without the identity of being in this marriage and who I was. What my story was going to look like now that this kind of narrative that I had for myself had kind of burnt to the ground. How I was gonna go forward into such an unknown and kind of terrifying place?”
Higgins absorbed the pain and from it, forged art. “The songs came out in desperation. Desperation to figure out the way forward.” Songwriting, for Higgins, “is very cathartic and therapeutic and they’ve always been a way for me to figure out stuff.”
At times, The Second Act overflows with hurt, loss, and the human experience.
On album track “When 4 Became 3,” Higgins sings, “But you should know I hate myself / I once believed I was someone else / You should know I’ve burned that dream / No one ever recovers from the hole that leaves.”
Reflecting on those lyrics, they were “very true at the time,” she accepts. “I didn’t hold back and I made a very conscious decision to not try and sound as though I was any more together or emotionally strong or stable than I was. I wanted to write from the heart of that ugly place that I was in, and say true things like ‘I hated myself’ and I was a mess and you should stay away from me. Because that’s exactly how I felt.”
Thankfully, Higgins finds herself in a better place. The nine-time ARIA Award winner is right at home on a stage, pouring out her music. Her live commitments stretch into mid-December, an itinerary that includes outdoor dates at the Sydney Opera House Forecourt, Kings Park in Perth, Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl, and three winery performances presented by A Day on the Green.
“That’s what I live for. I mean, playing live is my favourite part of the job,” she says. “And when you’ve written something so vulnerable, that’s terrifying at first to play. And then to receive such a warm response back from the audience… it makes me feel like what I am going through is something that other people can relate to.”
In years from now, when, perhaps Higgins is on tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Second Act, how might she feel about this current work, emerging as it did from an emotional trial?
“I think I’ll see it as a very brave album. I really wrote this album from the depths of despair. It was written from a pretty desperate, desperately miserable place. A lot of the time,” she recounts. “There’s this cultural pressure to be more together by your age and to be a bit more confident and be wise and have all the answers and write from a place of empowerment. But I wasn’t there. This is not the empowerment album. I’m hoping that might come next.”
Missy Higgins’ The Second Act is out now.
