Missy Higgins comes full circle on new album Solastaglia
SONGSTRESS Missy Higgins talks motherhood, saving the planet and being the object of Ed Sheeran’s affections as she prepares for the release of a new album and sellout Melbourne tour.
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IMAGINE meeting one of your idols — one that you’re about to go on tour with for a month.
Now imagine that idol knows you’ve been quite public about having a teenage crush on them. Gulp.
Such was the case for one of the biggest pop artists in the world, Ed Sheeran. He frequently recalls in interviews that discovering Missy Higgins was a pivotal moment in his life, and that he fancied her.
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Sheeran chose the affable 34-year-old Melburnian to support his one-man band across a record-breaking Australian stadium tour last month. “That made meeting him for the first time a bit awkward,” she says with a sideward glance that sums up “totes awks”.
“He said when he was 13 he came to Australia and he saw a live performance
I did at the Sydney Opera House, then went out and bought every EP I had and my first album and just devoured them.
“He was a big fan, which was amazing to learn … or at least used to be a big fan of mine,” Higgins adds, not letting herself get too big for her boots.
“Ed was talking about this really obscure B-side jazz song I wrote when I was 17 for my end-of-year assignment in year 12.”
It was called The Cactus That Found The Beat.
“I even do a bit of scatting in it. Oh god. Mega-cringe-worthy,” she says. “But that’s who I was back then so I can’t hide from that.”
Born Melissa Higgins in Melbourne in 1983, she learned to play classical piano from age six, studied at Geelong Grammar, gigged until she was good, then put out EPs and made a splash with her debut album, The Sound of White, in 2006. Since then she’s sold more than one million units (albums and singles) and won nine ARIAs.
She’s also been vocal about her bouts of anxiety and depression, but overcame them to walk on stage and play in front of more than one million people over the course of the epic Ed Sheeran tour through March.
Things didn’t get off to the best start in Perth
in front of 63,000 people. Higgins lost her voice fourth song in.
“I was overexcited,” Higgins says. “I was really nervous before the first show. That never does good things to my voice. My body felt stressed and overanxious. Subconsciously I must have been trying to lift my voice off to reach the person at the back of the stadium. I croaked my way through the last three songs of my set.”
Freddie Mercury always said he played to every last seat in the house, making Wembley Stadium feel like a lounge room. Higgins has done enough shows with orchestras and in weird venues that she could adjust her game plan.
“By the second show I figured out that the ginormous reverberation was fine and I could sing at my normal volume and everyone could hear me fine. I figured out I had a huge stage and I could walk around with the microphone and sing to specific people and do a bit of dancing, which doesn’t come naturally to me (laughs).”
Next to singer-songwriter, musician and actor (Bran Nue Dae), she is now a “rock star”.
And on the final show in Brisbane, she was invited to join Sheeran on stage to duet on his song Perfect. “I was pretty full of myself by the end of that tour. It was more about the spectacle than getting intimate.”
Speaking of intimate, we need to talk about certain emergency sleeping quarters from a decade back.
After her albums The Sound of White, On a Clear Night, The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle and Oz, Higgins wrote a love song to her husband — comedian and playwright Dan Lee — which appears on new record Solastalgia, out next week.
It’s the first single, titled Futon Couch. Some lyrics: “Hey, boy, whadda ya say we jump? I’m on the edge, Hey, know what I think? You’ll be kissing me against the kitchen sink.”
Higgins picks up the story. “He wanted a song written about him for so long. He was a bit worried because any time I’ve written a song about a relationship in the past ... it’s gone wrong. I said, ‘One day I’ll do it’. Then I threw caution to the wind. A futon couch isn’t romantic but it’s original.”
And functional.
“He said he was at the Ed Sheeran shows standing there when I was playing Futon Couch about to blurt ‘THIS IS ABOUT ME!’ to the young girls around him.”
Fast forward from that sharehouse dalliance and Higgins and Lee now have a three-year-old son, Samuel Arrow Lee, and are expecting a second child — a girl — later this year.
Higgins made the announcement on stage during the Sheeran tour, saying afterwards: “My bump was getting to the point where it was the elephant in the room/stadium!”
Not long after, Higgins took a tumble before playing — singing, not running off the halfback flank — at the AFL Women’s grand final at Carlton’s Ikon Park.
“I recovered from my injury remarkably quickly. I think it’s my super pregnancy healing powers. I tore a ligament in my foot and I was on crutches for a couple of days, then by the third day I was completely fine. I wish it was something as cool as taking a speccie but I was just walking up on stage to sound check.
“I was putting my in-ear monitors in and
I misjudged where the steps were. I’m a bit off balance at the moment, it was embarrassing. Luckily it was soft grass.”
Higgins is a trooper. And also bolshie from the early days when she was breaking through on Triple J by day yet, as she puts it, still treated like a second-class citizen by certain backstage crew members at night. Higgins was one of the
high-profile acts, along with Tina Arena and The Veronicas, who got behind the #MeNoMore campaign and signed the petition to call out sexual harassment in the Australian music industry.
The campaign started after allegations powerful men in Hollywood (Harvey Weinstein et al) had abused their positions.
“I was never sexually harassed in the music industry (but) I have been in other areas of my life, as most women have,” Higgins admits.
“I’ve felt bullying in the music industry. It’s
a boys’ club. My opinion was dismissed and disrespected in the early days, whereas I know if I was a man saying the same thing I would have been heard. I had to be extra assertive and when you do that you get eyes rolled behind your back and called a bitch. I’m happy that people are calling it out now.”
Local garage-rock trio Camp Cope is a wry, femme-inist band for Gen I(Phone). The Melbourne game-changers were critical of Falls Festival for the lack of female acts on its recent line-up. The internet got rather involved.
“I love what Camp Cope are all about,” Higgins says.
“Anyone that’s being vocal about discrimination at the moment is doing a great service to the industry. We’re in a time when the younger female musicians coming up are staking out their own territory.
“They’re being vocal about the fact not enough women get played on the radio and put on festival bills.”
Solastalgia is a noun coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, formed from a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain).
It describes a form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, such as climate change.
“When I started writing Solastalgia, I was becoming macabre in my thinking,” she says.
Higgins has been a long-time activist for environmental issues. She walks the walk.
“There’s a track called Starting Again. It’s about my son. Both my husband and I had doubts about bringing a child into the world,” she laments.
“My husband had always said he didn’t want to have children for environmental reasons (but) I quickly changed his mind.”
Twice.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” she says of baby number two’s impending arrival.
“I didn’t expect to be touring and promoting this album while pregnant. In a way it’s quite poignant because a lot of the album is about coming to terms with being a mother in an unstable world, and climate change, and trying to reconcile those things in my life.
“I became quite philosophical and existential about the whole thing.
“It keeps the narrative very strong on Solastalgia — a lot of the songs are about the end of the world.
“Ultimately I came full circle and came back to a place of hope. There’s more hope inside children than any technology and science. They’re a clean slate. The love for my children gives me hope for the future.”
And in the future Higgins will be idolised by not one but two little tackers.
“You have no choice but to be optimistic.”
SOLASTALGIA (EMI) IS OUT ON FRIDAY.
MISSYHIGGINS.COM
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