Missy Higgins was 21 when she first burst onto the Australian music scene with her debut album, The Sound Of White. But it’s now, at 41, that she’s really hitting her stride.
In fact, today – exactly 20 years since her first album hit #1 – Higgins’ long-awaited newest work, The Second Act, tops the ARIA charts once again.
Higgins might not fit the mould of young, boppy singers who typically dominate today’s charts, but that doesn’t mean her sound hasn’t cut through. For proof, you need only look at the sold-out crowds from her recent national tour, which saw her performing a combination of her most iconic and newest hits at more than 40 venues across Australia. In fact, demand for these shows was so unprecedented that Higgins has added five final encore dates for fans who missed out on scoring tickets the first time. To top it all off, in November, she’s set to join other Aussie musical legends like Kylie Minogue and Olivia Newton John when she’s inducted into the the ARIA Hall of Fame.
So how has she managed to sustain this kind of relevance across a two decades-long career? In large part, it’s thanks to the unfaltering honesty and relatability of her lyrics. Take one of Higgins’ earliest hits, ‘The Special Two’, in which she honours a special relationship in her life with the kind of candour that has immortalised the song as the go-to track for breakups and weddings alike. In fact, only recently did the singer reveal that the song actually isn’t about longing for a romantic lover, but instead was written as an apology to her older sister, after the pair had a fight over a boy when Higgins was just a teenager.
“I overstepped the mark. And I was just devastated because she was like a mother-figure to me growing up. And I wrote her this song as an apology,” she revealed to Australian Story.
Then there’s ‘Scar’, the equal-parts upbeat and heartbreaking single with lyrics that hit as close to home now as they did when the track was first released in 2024. In addition to being the ultimate cry-in-the-car song, ‘Scar’ was shrouded in controversy, thanks to the second verse, where Higgins sings about a mystery woman. As a result, ‘Scar’ opened up the singer to unrelenting speculation about her sexuality – an experience that the singer isn’t shying away from all those years later.
“Everyone was speculating about my sexuality, which was such a personal thing, and such a thing I was grappling with,” she told Anh Do on Brush With Fame in 2021.
“All the journalists were trying to get an answer out of me, they all wanted me to say I was gay and to come out loud and proud but I was still figuring it out myself, and I felt so much pressure to put myself in a box and to put a label on it from everybody else.”
And now, there’s The Second Act, a devastatingly relatable 11-song mediation on the breakdown of her marriage from playwright Dan Lee, and how she’s weathering the aftermath alongside her children, Samuel, 8, and Luna, 6.
A lot has changed in the 20 years since Higgins was first in our ears – and the subject matter of her music has matured significantly as a result. But through it all, she hasn’t lost her ability to captivate her legions of fans with her devastatingly relatable lyrics.
