INTERVIEW: Missy Higgins on her new album 'The Second Act': "If I try to force myself to be in a place that I'm not, then it's going to take all of the power and the authenticity out of the songs."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Tajette O'Halloran
Published: 10 September 2024
Missy Higgins is one of Australia’s most treasured artists. After bursting on to the music scene in 2004 with her number 1 single ‘Scar’, she has been an ever present star on the country’s cultural landscape.
She has just released her sixth studio album The Second Act, which was purposefully released exactly 20 years to the day since her debut album The Sound of White, and Higgins says it is somewhat a sequel to her first ever album.
In those six years since her last album, Higgins’s life has changed irrevocably and The Second Act focuses on that seismic shift in her life: the breakdown of her marriage. In this tender, confronting and moving collection of eleven songs, Higgins charts the disintegration of a long-term relationship in her own unique way – not by relaying stories of bad behaviour and broken hearts, but by capturing the messiness, the contradictions, the shame and the grief connected with falling out of love.
To frame The Second Act and tell its story, Higgins has bookended the album with perhaps the two biggest moments of a break-up, but in reverse order. The first song, ‘You Should Run’, a heartbreaking piano ballad with a masterful vocal performance from Higgins, focuses on a major turning point in the new post-breakup life – starting a new relationship. But instead of the blissful sensations of loving again, this is about being weighed down by the baggage of a relationship that has just ended. “Loving me will never be fun / You’ll never be my number one / And you deserve that from someone,” she sings. After starting the album with her new life, Higgins closes it with the end of her previous life. The guitar ballad ‘Blue Velvet Dress’ details the moment Higgins knew her marriage was over – which just happened to be on national television as she performed at the 2021 New Year’s Eve concert in Sydney. “Smiling so well no one knows it’s pretend / … Nobody knew that I’d just lost you.” It is an emotionally powerful song, and even though it brings a tear to the eye, it ends on a note of hope, with the blue velvet dress Higgins wore for her performance transformed into a metaphor for her relationship: “I’m seeing it now / Like I couldn’t before / Blue velvet ain’t my colour no more.”
The impact of the break-up on her children is also covered on songs such as ‘A Complicated Truth’, a gorgeous piano-based track that swells with an brass instrument soundscape towards the end. It tackles the sometimes messy nature of co-parenting and all the feelings that come with it, and is in many ways a love letter from Higgins to her children.
Elsewhere on the album Higgins doesn’t shy away from the mental anguish that accompanies a break-up. The sparse ‘When 4 Became 3’, with its lyric embellished only by simple keyboard lines and layered backing vocals that lend the song a gospel feel, looks at the end of a once-cherished family unit, and the subsequent guilt: “You should know I hate myself /… You should know a part of me / Got left behind when four became three.”
Meanwhile, ‘The In-Between’ highlights the struggle of being stuck in a transitional space where nothing feels right: “Why can’t I seem to move? / I’m not who I used to be / Not yet who I’ll become.” The most upbeat song on the album, ‘Craters’, with its steady country-rock beat, physicalises the ache of a break-up and how others react to it, often with awkwardness and not knowing what to say or do. “There’s a crater in my living room floor / I have to walk around it just to get to my front door,” she sings. “And it’s embarrassing having people over / Watching them politely trying not to fall.”
The Second Act is moving, raw, emotional, heartbreaking, life affirming and full of hope, and is a truly mesmerising album. You cannot walk away from it without it leaving its mark on you. It is an incredible accomplishment that solidifies just why Higgins is still such a special artist twenty years into her career, and The Second Act is arguably her greatest achievement to date. We recently sat down with her to talk more about the creation of the album.
Hi Missy. Thank you very much for your time this morning. Congratulations on The Second Act, it is really, really beautiful. You must be stoked.
Oh, thank you. Yeah. I am. It was an intense, pretty emotional period of writing, but it's a bit of a blur now. I look back at the writing process and I go, ‘how did I just write an album?’ I'm not really sure. I get very, very obsessed and very all consumed by writing for the period that I'm writing, and then I finish and I'm completely out of that headspace, and I can't quite relate to the me that I was a few months ago when I was writing.
I think that's wonderful though, because you can hear that in this album, you are going through these emotions in real time. What's very strong about the writing in this album is you've kept, for lack of a better word, the ugly.
Yeah, I've kept the messiness and the the unattractive parts of grief the parts where you kind of hate yourself, and you're feeling sorry for yourself, and you're going, ‘Why me? This is not what was meant to happen’. It's very unedited, and I made a conscious decision to do that, because at the time the feelings, the stuff I was going through just felt so potent, I felt if I tried to tidy this up, to make me sound a bit more together, or a little bit wiser, or if I try to force myself to be in a place that I'm not, then it's going to take all of the power and the authenticity out of the songs. I knew that I had to be real, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to write it because it is a very therapeutic thing for me to do. Some people write songs because they love the craft of writing and they love constructing a well crafted piece of music, but for me, it's an outpouring of emotion that I try to find music to match with. It was a matter of survival really writing these songs, there was no way I could pretend to be any more together than I was.
The death of a relationship, is the crux of so much music, but it's not usually a place that we get to see after the fall, because it's not sexy, the mess isn't sexy. And when you're navigating children through these emotions, when we can't be black or white, it's hard to process as well. You've done something really outstanding with this album by talking about that, and listening to this album, I was like, ‘why don't we hear about this?’
I mean, it's a harder thing to write about, I guess, because of the nuance involved, and because it doesn't cast anybody as a villain. There's just a lot of shame and disappointment, and they're all very unsexy adult emotions. The vast majority of the songs on the radio are written from a very, very small time period, at the beginning of a relationship or at the end with a big explosion. But there's very rarely songs written about long term relationships slowly disintegrating and the aftermath of that, and the complication and the messiness of it, when kids are involved. I'm lucky, because I feel like I'm at a point in my life now where I'm not trying to write songs for the radio, and I'm not trying to write songs to appeal for a young audience. I'm actually not trying to write songs for anybody other than myself. I feel as long as I keep writing songs for the same reason, which is, to work through very difficult emotions that I'm going through, then people will probably be able to relate to them. I've always made a conscious choice not try and preach anything, and not try and tell anybody how to live their lives and not pretend that I have any answers that I don't and I think that’s what people respond to. The best thing about music is when it can make you feel not so alone, and if I'm pretending to be a stronger human being than I am, then I'm going to make everybody else who's really struggling going through what I'm going through, it's going to make them feel like a weaker human being. You gotta admit where you are.
That's so true. The Second Act is described as a sequel to your debut, The Sound of White. You've said about how you're going back to this place of absolute integrity and making music for you and not making music for the radio. Did you find that in the early stages of your career you were swept up in ‘now you have to make this kind of album, and now you have to make this kind of album, and now you have to stay relevant’?
I definitely felt the pressure to keep on making songs that people liked and I guess that's the trap that people fall into when their first album is successful. It's very hard to ever match the success of your first album, but I did an okay job of dodging that pressure for my second album, because everybody had warned me about how hard it is to write a follow up album and how likely it is that I would get writer's block. So I wrote all the songs for my second album as I was touring the first album before I could start feeling any pressure basically. I started writing almost straight away. But it was the third album that I got really stuck on, because I had signed to an American record label, and it was all just this big money making machine that I'd gotten lost in. It felt very much like I had just become this cog in this machine, and the only thing that really mattered to the people surrounding me were chart numbers and record sales. I'd lost touch with why I started writing songs in the first place, and it took me a long time to get that love of music back. I had to quit music and take a few years of self discovery in order to get back to music and do it completely on my own terms. And ever since then, I've really tried to just take it slow and always remind myself to make music for the right reasons and don't burn myself out. Always keep that flame alive for music, maintain that that love of music, which is a very it's a delicate thing, because my hobby has become my career. If I push it too hard and I burn out that creative side of myself, that's when I start really disliking what I do. So I try to only do things that I feel will help me in the long term, stay inspired and maintain longevity in my career, because I want to keep doing this forever.
Do you think the longevity comes artists that have continued as much as they can to create the music that they want to listen to and to not get caught up in the machine of hit, hit, hit?
Yeah, I think so. You look at Paul Kelly, and he just seems to have maintained or stayed true to himself and his own songwriting. He seems to genuinely love the craft of songwriting and performing, and I don't feel like he has sold out in any way or done anything that feels particularly inauthentic to him. I think the people that I love have always released the music that they want to release, and it doesn't feel like there's anybody behind the scenes pulling the strings. It always just feels like what you're getting from the artist is who they are, and every part of it was their making and their decision. You're not being sold a product, you're being told stories by somebody about their life. It's a beautiful exchange, it feels a real exchange, rather than a product that you're buying.
You’re not just a prolific figure within the Australian music industry, but you're a very inspiring figure within the industry, particularly for young women. Have you noticed the industry, particularly in Australia, changing since your beginnings? Do you feel like it's getting better for female artists?
I think the industry feels a bit more supportive for female artists now, and particularly amongst non-males. We seem to have a bit more of an international mindset in that there's enough room for all of us. The truth is, there is a bit more now then there was back in my day, with streaming and online platforms. It just seems like it's easier to achieve overseas success now than it ever has been if something gets picked up in America or goes viral online.Back in my day, literally the only reason someone ever played me in America in the first place was because some guy came to Australia and got hold of a CD 'All For Believing', my song that won Triple J Unearthed. And he played that on his Los Angeles community radio station, and then it got picked up from there. But obviously with the internet now it would have been a lot easier back in the day.
I wanted to ask you about the title track of this album, of this notion of a new chapter. What does that chapter look like for you, not just personally, but also musically. Where do you see yourself exploring moving forward with your integrity for sound and music creation?
Do you know, I've never had any idea where I'll go musically. It's not something I plan. I don't have a vision or a goal. I think the only thing I can see moving forward for myself is producing and engineering by myself a bit more. I loved that part of making this album so much, and I loved making it at home and recording late at night, after the kids had gone to bed, and just making it feel really real and in the space, and taking my time with it and chipping away at it every day. Probably in the future I'll get more into the production and engineering side, because it's not something that I've really done much of in the past, and I really loved the process this time.
The Second Act is out now via Eleven/EMI Records. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Missy Higgins on Instagram and Facebook.
