‘I cry in the pantry’: Missy Higgins nailed teenage angst – now for midlife woes

This story is part of the August 31 edition of Good Weekend.See all 11 stories.

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″When you’re young you have this image of your life / That you’ll be scrupulous and one day even make a wife”
– The Special Two (2004)

“Oh my god, I haven’t had enough sleep.” Missy Higgins is in her kitchen, trying to make me a coffee. She moves gingerly, like you do when you’ve had too much tequila the night before. Which she did. This is unusual for the singer-songwriter, who isn’t much of a drinker. But her tour manager purchased a bottle of the Mexican spirit to celebrate what felt like a particularly special show at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre. “I really felt the energy of the audience last night, I felt they were with me.” Everyone came offstage on a real high, she says. “Ew!” She’s near the sink and turning her nose. “The compost stinks.”

This is the weirdness of being Missy Higgins right now. Since March she’s played 40 sold-out performances across Australia to 80,000 people. Each night, an adoring audience laps up her new stuff, while rapturously mouthing every word of her old material (in the show’s second act she plays the whole of her mega-selling album, The Sound of White, to mark its 20th anniversary). And then, at least when the 41-year-old is playing in Melbourne, she leaves the hotel the next morning and drives to her bush-nestled home in the outer north-eastern suburbs, where she must face the whiffy compost and the unremitting demands of being a single mum (Higgins ­separated from her playwright husband Dan Lee, 51, in 2021; they have two children, Luna, 6, and Sam, 9).

Last night, Higgins’ doting parents Chris and Margaret looked after the kids. When Higgins arrived home a few hours ago, everyone had left for school drop-off, but she found some interesting evidence of the kind of morning they’d had: a confetti of sprinkles, the sort you’d put on a cupcake, scattered across the table. Sprinkles, of course, aren’t exactly a breakfast staple. “I’m like, ‘What did you feed my kids for breakfast?’ ” She says this with mock outrage. “I can’t complain, they’re looking after my kids a lot these days. They are a lifesaver, they really are.”

The Second Act, Higgins’ first full-length album in six years, is released next week. The album has been inspired by “a real reckoning that happens at this point in your life”.Credit: Mia Mala McDonald

We sit at the table amid the sprinkles. Higgins’ hair, still glamorously blow-waved from last night, is at odds with her casual outfit: green tracksuit pants and a much-loved vintage Ken Done jumper that reminds her of her ’80s childhood. Her 1970s house is light-filled, with exposed brick and reclaimed timber beams and, a few minutes into our chat, she points out the places she’s sat to cry since the separation. “I cry on that step there,” she nods to some stairs, near a wall of kids’ art. “And I cry in the pantry. I’ve got a little crying stool. I call it my crying stool because, like, the kids can’t see me when I go in there to cry.”

There’s been quite a bit of crying. When she began writing music about the separation, she sat at her piano and worked on a song called Story for the Ages. The first line was “It was never meant to be like this”. “I was just crying on the piano singing that line, over and over again. It would have been very dramatic if you were a fly on the wall.” The winter sun briefly floods the room. Outside there’s a mess of life-jackets and little boots and, at the bottom of a bush slope, the Yarra River, where if she’s lucky she spots a platypus on her morning walks. That moment at the piano, she says, was about acknowledging her sadness that things didn’t go to plan. “It was about letting myself mourn the loss of what I thought was a great love story.”

This process – sitting at the piano, crying on the piano – has produced The Second Act, Higgins’ first full-length album in six years. Released next week, the album is a departure from regular Missy Higgins territory. There’s nothing about climate change, the refugee crisis or the outside world. Like The Sound of White, which had the teenage Missy pouring her heart out, this album goes within. It is personal and unfiltered but, as her long-term manager John Watson says, there are no he-did-me-wrong songs like on Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill or Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour. Higgins is tackling more profound issues than just an examination of a broken heart, as serious as that is. What she’s really exploring is: Who am I now? Who do I want to be now? What goes in the space where once a great love story lived? What do you tell the kids about why you can’t live with Daddy? What happens when you were scrupulous and one day you did make a wife. But now you’re an ex-wife. What now?

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“And all that I can tell you is a complicated truth / I’ll always love your daddy / But now our love is something new”
– A Complicated Truth (2024)

It’s early May and Missy Higgins is on stage at the Palais, alone at the piano. Bathed in a blue spotlight, she’s singing a new song called The Broken Ones. It’s about never falling again for “the tortured juggling knives ones, the beautiful crazy-eyed ones, death-tugging-at-their-mind ones”. At the song’s end, there’s also an admission of her own cracks and flaws: “Who’s gonna fall for this broken one?” The new songs, and her shockingly honest on-stage confessions, make the show terribly sad in places. I cry. Other women around me cry, for their own pain and losses, I suspect, as well as Higgins’. Bassist Zoe Hauptmann tells me that the band cried in rehearsals. Higgins cries every show, which she’s now telling the audience. “I’ve thought about putting Missy Higgins Tissues for sale as part of the show’s merchandise. I could make a bit more money off my sadness.” This lightens the mood, and everyone laughs. (Higgins, who has great comic timing, constantly relieves the sadness with self-deprecating quips, making the performance a cathartic ride of cry-laugh-repeat.)

‘I went on a few dates, but it’s just weird because they know who I am. And I know that they know who I am.’

The song that really gets people crying is A Complicated Truth, which is about Higgins answering Luna’s questions about her parents’ divorce. How, asked Luna from the backseat of the car, can you just stop being married after you’ve made promises to each other? Judging by Higgins’ Instagram page, this song resonates with parents currently going through this and the adults who were once those backseat children (“Your new songs have coincided with my marriage breakdown and separation. It’s like you’re writing my life,” wrote one fan). There’s a real sense on this tour, Higgins tells me, that her fans – having first connected with her over the angst of adolescence 20 years ago – are now connecting with her over the angst of midlife. “There’s a real reckoning that happens at this point in your life. You’re not in the first act or the last act, you’re in this weird kind of uncomfortable middle act.”

Higgins’ 40-date national tour performances incorporated all of her hit debut album, The Sound of White.Credit: Louise Cui

At one point, Higgins muses on stage about the difficulties of dating. A bloke yells out: “I’d date ya Missy!” This is typical at a Missy Higgins gig. There’s plenty of back-and-forth banter with the audience, such as the woman near the front who compliments the singer on her shorts-clad bum. “Thanks love,” says Higgins, chuffed. “I do me squats!”

She doesn’t tell the audience this, but the songwriter tried online dating after the separation. She went on the dating app for famous people called Raya. “It was just awful. I quickly deleted it because it’s all bloody supermodels and Instagram influencers. I was like, ‘These people are … completely out of my league!’” She also tried the dating apps for regular people. “With my photo and everything!” My mind reels at this: imagine swiping on your phone one day and up pops Missy Higgins. “I went on a few dates, but it’s just weird because they know who I am. And I know that they know who I am. They were really nice guys, but I just …” she pauses. “It takes a very, very long time for me to trust people … So I don’t think the apps were for me.”

Higgins with her children, Sam and Luna.Credit: Courtesy of Missy Higgins

But back to the bloke who wants to date Missy, and let’s face it, who doesn’t want to date Missy? I want to date Missy and I don’t even date women. Or date. Quick as a flash she says: “Well, just wait until you hear this next song.” And that song, one of my favourites on the album, is You Should Run, about dating as a single mother: “Loving me will never be easy babe / These four little hands / Pull me a million ways.” It’s a warning to the new lover that she comes with two small humans and a messy house. And he can’t be number one. “Quite a few songs on the album are basically telling people to stay away from me because I’m a bad idea to date at the moment.”

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“’Cause I’m a little bit tired of fearing that I’ll be / The bad fruit nobody buys”
– Scar (2004)

When The Sound of White was released, Rolling Stone in America described Higgins as “pretty, well-meaning and utterly conventional”. While a few music critics – almost all of whom were men – praised the album, many underestimated it. The Sound of White went on to be a “beast of an album”, as former Triple J music director Richard Kingsmill puts it. It sold more than a million copies worldwide – 871,000 of those in Australia – making it the equal-fourth highest-selling home-grown album (behind John Farnham’s Whispering Jack, Delta Goodrem’s Innocent Eyes, AC/DC’s Back in Black and equal to Savage Garden’s Savage Garden).

The album had anthems like The Special Two, which is often thought to be about two lovers but is actually Higgins’ apology for moving in on a guy who her big sister Nicola liked. There was the title song, The Sound of White, about the death of Higgins’ cousin and fellow schoolmate, Nick, who died of cancer at the age of 18. And, of course, there was Scar, which appears to reference a male lover and a female lover (but was actually about her experience with American co-songwriters) and became something of a seminal song in the queer community. (In a Guardian review of a Higgins show last month, writer Joseph Earp described how, after the gig, “queers with red-rimmed eyes – myself included” stood outside as fans launched into an a cappella rendition of Scar.) Scar debuted at No.1 and the album went on to win six ARIA awards, with Higgins famously jumping on and straddling actor David Hasselhoff at the awards ceremony (Higgins, who is being inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame this year, has won nine ARIAs).

In David Hasselhoff ’s arms at the 2005 ARIAs.Credit: Edwina Pickles

Before I started researching for this piece, I had no idea about the strength and dedication of the Missy Higgins fan base. They are women, mostly, of her generation, sometimes a little younger or older, who had The Sound of White etched into their adolescent neuro-wiring and have stuck with her. These are the people who sustain her career because, remarkably, she still mostly fails to get her songs played on commercial radio, a belated embracer of The Sound of White. One of these fans is lawyer Stef Holland, 30, who listened to The Sound of White through her childhood and into her teens. It then became the soundtrack of her friendship group as they lived in Melbourne share houses. “What makes her really special is that she writes about these human experiences that a lot of us women, and generally just people, feel and experience and can take their own meaning from,” she tells me. (Filmmaker Rachel Perkins, a friend of the songwriter, loves going to the shows and watching fans like Holland. “They are predominantly women, not always, but they know every word and sing it back to her and there’s just tears rolling down their cheeks as they’re singing.”)

But look further and you can see the Missy Higgins legacy elsewhere. The Sound of White and her second album On a Clear Night inspired a generation of Australian female singer-songwriters including Gordi, Odette, Amy Shark, Gretta Ray, Alice Skye and Angie McMahon. Sophie Payten, who performs as Gordi, was 12 when The Sound of White came out. “It felt like a lightning bolt directly into the centre of my brain,” the 31-year-old tells me over a video call. “You’d be hard pressed to find a female artist in Australia who didn’t get into this because [of Higgins]. It’s akin to when Cathy Freeman ran the 400 metres. You’ve got all these kids growing up thinking they can do the same.”

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“But I simply can’t believe / That our story for the ages / Is now ashes at my feet”
– Story for the Ages (2024)

It’s kind of wild that Missy Higgins quit music when she was 26. Like, really gave it up. In 2009, she took her manager John Watson out to lunch and told him that was it. He tried vainly to change her mind, but Higgins was adamant. She’d been trying to write songs for two years and it was making her miserable.

She’d arrived on the Australian music scene at 17, after her sister Nicola sent a tape of All for Believing to Triple J’s Unearthed competition (Higgins had started piano lessons at six, and by 14 was singing at jazz gigs around Melbourne with brother David).

With sister Nicola (who sent her tape to Triple J’s Unearthed competition) and brother David.Credit: Courtesy of Missy Higgins

At the time, Higgins was finishing year 12 as a boarder at Geelong Grammar. It’s a pretty swish school: the King spent two terms at the rural campus, Timbertop, in 1966. Nicola, eight years older than Higgins, had won a scholarship there, and their grandmother paid the school fees for Higgins and her brother David. The Higginses were a solidly middle-class family from the well-to-do Melbourne suburb of Armadale. Chris Higgins is a GP and Margaret Higgins started a childcare centre, which she still owns (“My mother is a badass businesswoman,” Higgins says). They were a close family, so close that Higgins remembers interlopers, like boyfriends and girlfriends, weren’t particularly welcome at family dinners. “They were very sacred.”

The year before winning the Unearthed competition, Higgins had started taking party and recreational drugs and was feeling the mounting pressure to get good grades. One day, she had what she describes as a “mental collapse” at school and was hospitalised. She told her father that she thought she had depression and he admitted that he, too, suffered from the condition and that it ran in the family. This was the beginning of Higgins’ journey with fluctuating mental health, which would become exacerbated by the pressures of fame, media scrutiny, touring and one particularly crappy boyfriend.

There were many pressure points. The media constantly speculated about her sexuality (Higgins was secretly seeing a woman while she was touring The Sound of White). The record labels, particularly her American one, wanted her to wear short skirts, sing higher and sound more girly. There was also the emotional fallout from a toxic relationship. Several Sound of White songs are about this man, who was six years older and also a musician. Every day for a year after their break-up, she says, he texted “abusive stuff” and would tell her that her music was “a pathetic example of Australian musical mediocrity”. “My confidence was beaten so low by him that I am still trying to get his voice out of my head,” she says.

Then, between late 2007 and early 2009, Higgins toured On a Clear Night, playing 140 US shows over 18 months. She started to feel part of a “massive machine”. She’d also had no space to enjoy her 20s or, as her brother David once memorably put it: “She never got to wake up in a strange house with carpet in her mouth like the rest of us.” At the tender age of 26, Missy Higgins was burnt out.

With parents Margaret and Chris.Credit: Courtesy of Missy Higgins

So she quit and took up Indigenous studies at university. She cried at the feet of gurus, cried while kneeling at temples and on holy mountains she … you guessed it, cried. She took the mind-bending brew ayahuasca in a remote barn in rural San Francisco with Australian songwriter Ben Lee. “I really eat-prayed-loved my way across the world. And I was miserable the whole time, pretty much,” she says. She was searching for a way to be happy without her antidepressant medication. At this point I’m sitting at her table in her house, leaning forward with anticipation that Higgins is going to reveal the answer to the secret to happiness. But she doesn’t. “I think I probably just had to go back on my medication.” But then she adds another discovery: music was her real spiritual lifeblood.

Higgins was lured back to music when she was offered a spot on the 2010 Lilith Fair tour (a music festival for female artists co-founded by Canadian songwriter Sarah McLachlan, one of Higgins’ idols). She’d given up music partly because she thought it was a selfish career. But after the Lilith gigs, fans were pleading with her to keep going. She realised that her music was bigger than her and she’s been grateful to do it ever since. “Now I feel like my storytelling contributes something worthy to the world. I’m totally OK with my role now.” Higgins finally broke the writing drought in 2012 with her third album, The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle. A collection of Australian covers called Oz followed in 2014. In 2018, her album Solastalgia was full of the existential angst of a new mother, for the planet and herself. In the same year she supported Ed Sheeran on his Australian tour and then, during the pandemic, headed in another direction, writing the soundtrack for Rachel Perkins’ ABC political drama Total Control.

Higgins started piano lessons at age six.Credit: Courtesy of Missy Higgins

Despite her successes, Missy Higgins still has to battle with her internal world. Every month, she says, her emotions are a painful roller coaster. “Every time I go down I just go, ‘Oh god, I can’t live like this.’ And then I just wait it out.” But the audience-love from this tour and the accomplishment of this album have buoyed her. Higgins not only wrote the songs, but also was the main producer and played most of the instruments. She made it in her home studio after the kids had gone to sleep, a whiskey atop her piano. “There was something about a very dark, quiet house late at night that held the weight of those songs.” she says. “I feel like I’m writing the best songs of my career.”

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“Something inside me is trying to remember a story / Oh, I think I’ve loved you, I’ve loved you before”
– Futon Couch (2018)

It’s late July when I meet Missy Higgins for our next interview at one of her old haunts, the Abbotsford Convent (I love that she turns up wearing the same outfit as the first interview: green pants and the Ken Done jumper). The convent’s grand old buildings, on the banks of the Yarra in inner Melbourne, are now a cultural hub and for a few years, Higgins and then-husband Dan Lee lived in a nearby warehouse. It was here that Higgins hired a room with a desk to write Oz, her book of extended liner notes to go with her 2014 album. It was also here, at the cafe Cam’s Kiosk, that she would meet her mothers’ group. And down towards the river, the Collingwood Children’s Farm was where she and Lee married in 2016.

‘I think it’s much better to have several really nourishing, good-for-the-soul relationships over one long, kind of mediocre one.’

They met in 2013 in Broome, a place Higgins adores (in 2009 she starred in Rachel Perkins’ movie Bran Nue Dae, filmed around there). Lee, who was writing plays, was living with a friend of Higgins’. So the songwriter kept visiting for cups of tea. Eventually, she got out her guitar and serenaded him with Colin Hay’s Waiting for My Real Life to Begin (a song they would later walk down the aisle to). It was a whirlwind romance: engaged in six months and pregnant in 11. As a love song for Lee, she penned Futon Couch, an upbeat pop tune with domestic overtones about kisses against the kitchen sink. To mark their engagement, Higgins and Lee each got an arrow tattooed on one of their feet. The two arrows – side by side, not touching – represent what Higgins believes is the ideal relationship: being close and there for each other, but not messed up in the other’s business; maintaining a sense of self.

With Dan Lee in 2017. The couple split in 2021 and now co-parent.Credit: WireImage

Higgins doesn’t go into the reasons for the separation but says that, like in many relationships, they found themselves tested by the arrival of children: the lack of time to foster a connection, the inability to parent together. “We are both very sensitive people, and put a couple of kids into the mix and suddenly your life needs to be structured and you need to be on the same page about parenting.” The end came on the last day of 2021. Higgins had been crying all day in her hotel room and then performed for the ABC’s New Year’s Eve show at the Sydney Opera House. The new song Blue Velvet Dress (“I’d painted over every red streak down my face/That’s the night everything changed”) was about, she says, getting up on stage “after your heart’s been completely crushed and your world’s been turned upside down”. Higgins says she and Lee have a wonderful relationship as co-parents. There’s no fighting, no animosity. They call each other darl and chat about dating. “We’re very much still there for each other as co-parents … But now we really are doing [the arrow thing], side by side with no tangles.”

As she said 20 years ago in The Special Two, Higgins always wanted to one day make a wife. She’d internalised the societal message that this is what you are supposed to do, not just as a person but as a woman. Her parents were strong role models, too. She held their happy marriage in “very, very high regard”: “I wanted to give my kids exactly [the sense of stability] I’d had growing up. The thought that I will never do that, regardless of what happens in the future, is something I’m still reckoning with. Every day I’ve still got to be compassionate with myself and not berate myself for somehow f---ing it all up.”

Divorce is made harder, she says, because of how we believe in the story of marriage. We think it will be forever, she says, and that forever means success. “I don’t think you notice that cultural story going on until you’re outside of it. Now that I’m not married, I’ve realised what an obsession our culture has with the story of forever.” Does she still believe in marriage as an institution? “No” is her definite reply. Then she reconsiders, slightly. “I think it’s a beautiful notion … But I don’t think I could go into it again with the naivety I did the first time. I see people around me getting separated and divorced constantly and I think, well – what does marriage even mean any more? We’re not locked into it.” Later, she tells me: “I think it’s much better to have several really nourishing, good-for-the-soul relationships over one long, kind of mediocre one. Life’s too short for that.”

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“Then when I failed, what it took from me /But it’s intermission, life’s calling me back /I think I’m ready for the second act”
– The Second Act (2024)

At Cam’s Kiosk, two young women are surreptitiously taking photos of Higgins. As a keen observer of humans, Higgins has spotted them too. It amuses her that the pair have been sitting together on their phones, not talking to each other. “Maybe I’ll get on some famous person’s TikTok and the young kids might know my name,” she jokes.

With band members Emma Goodland (left) and Zoe Hauptmann. The trio got their three-dot tattoos together; Higgins says the dots represent her and her two children as well as her “crazy, beautiful life”.Credit: @missyhigginsmusic/Instagram

Higgins has always been sensitive to the world’s injustices (you can see this in Oh Canada, about the drowning of two-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi and her songs about climate change). Does she feel like speaking out about any issue now? “I’m really in the thick of survival mode,” she bends a leg and tucks it underneath her on the bench seat. “Since the separation, my focus has been on trying to figure out how to be a single mum while working at my absolute capacity. Rather than trying to save the world, sometimes you’ve just got to work on saving yourself.”

While she’s not speaking out, her values are embedded in the way she runs her band and tours. In an industry often unfriendly to women with young children, she’s created a workplace that welcomes them (her crew and band for the Second Act tour employs 10 women and five men). This means paying for nannies and making time for breastfeeding breaks in rehearsal. Bassist Zoe Hauptmann joined Higgins when she had an 18-month-old at home and was pregnant with twins. It’s been life-changing because she’d expected that kids would end her career as a touring session musician. “I just really can’t speak highly enough of Missy in that regard. She really is groundbreaking.” Now fast friends with Higgins, Hauptmann describes her mate as a patient, gorgeous, beautiful human who is empathic “maybe to a fault”. “I think she could be a bit harder sometimes,” she says.

As Higgins’ manager John Watson points out, the new album is not entirely bleak. “There is a break-up in the rearview mirror, but it’s about what’s out the windscreen.” It’s true that there’s lots of hope scattered like sprinkles in her lyrics. In You Should Run, about having a relationship as a single mother, the last line is “But if easy is not your way / God, I’d love you to stay.” In Craters, she says: “And I’m gonna soar so beautifully / It’ll hurt your eyes.” And in the title track, she says she’s ready for the second act. What that will be though, is anyone’s guess. “I’m trying to be OK with the uncomfortableness of not knowing what the next chapter is going to hold,” she says. “And having faith that it’s going to be fine.”

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