When Missy Higgins wrote her acclaimed 2004 debut, The Sound of White, it was the work of a young artist cataloguing in unflinching detail the confusing journey from her teens into adulthood. Twenty years later, The Second Act is a similarly confessional outing—so much so that Higgins regards it almost as a sequel to her debut—only this time the Melbourne-born singer-songwriter is standing on the cusp of middle age, reeling from the divorce from her partner and father of their two children. “There’s not really any songs about our actual relationship or even the breakup,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s all about what happened after and the rebuilding that I had to do. And I guess the feeling of having to start again and reassess everything that you stand for and your identity and how you’re going to move forward now that your old narrative has completely burned to the ground. I think a lot of the things I was trying to work through as I was writing these songs is how do I just learn to let go and accept that I am where I am and I don’t actually have any control?” The majority of those writing sessions took place at night in Higgins’ home studio once her children were asleep. “So most of the demos are very quiet, I’m almost whisper-singing into my phone,” she says. “When I went to record them, I wanted it to feel like I was still in that place where I wrote them—I wanted the songs to reflect that feeling of introspection and aloneness and quietness, and I wanted them to [have] the raw emotion of when I wrote them.” While there is hope to be found in the joyful folk of “Craters” and majestic closer “Blue Velvet Dress”, ultimately The Second Act is mired in sadness. “I would have much rather written a very ‘I am woman, hear me roar, life’s better than ever now I’m single and empowered’ kind of album, but that’s not what I was feeling at the time so it wouldn’t have been genuine,” admits Higgins. Here, the songwriter takes Apple Music through The Second Act, track by track. “You Should Run” “It was quite hard choosing the order of the songs because I would have liked to have done it chronologically, as in start with the songs about the earlier days and then finish with the songs where it felt like I’d ended up. But grief doesn’t really work like that—you’re good one day and then you’re back at the start the next. So I wanted to start with ‘You Should Run’ because I feel like it’s a quite engaging lyric and it seems to sum up quite a bit about my general headspace when I was writing this album. It’s a song about trying to move on after a big breakup and the messiness and complication of opening your heart to someone new when you still feel very broken and damaged, and you feel like your life, especially as a single parent, is a lot for someone else to take on.” “A Complicated Truth” “When I wrote this song, I had a day when the kids weren’t at home and it was a wintry, windy day. I was sitting at the piano just watching the gumtrees sway outside and the house felt so empty. I felt a real absence of my kids. Not long before I wrote that song, [my daughter] Luna had been asking about her dad and I and why we had split up and why we couldn’t all live in the same house as a family, and it was really playing on my mind that I hadn’t given her the right answers. It’s really hard to know how to answer a five-year-old in language they’ll understand. So I thought if I could put the answers to her question in a song, or at least try and explain myself a bit better, then perhaps one day she might be able to listen to it and understand what went on a bit better, and have a little bit more of an idea of what it was like from our perspective and how complicated love can be when you’re a grown-up. That, ultimately, we tried our best and there’s still so much love in the family.” “When 4 Became 3” “This song was written from a place of really low self-confidence and a feeling of deep shame about what went on. And again trying to have a relationship and it just really not working because of the issues I was still grappling with as far as not being able to do the thing that I promised myself I would stick at till the end and give my kids that happy ending that I had always imagined for them. When I wrote that chorus—‘You should know I hate myself’—it was such a devastating thing to sing out loud and I was like, ‘Is this too full-on?’. But then I thought, ‘Bugger it, I’m making a decision to be as honest as possible on this album even if it’s a really pathetic, unflattering view that I have of myself.’” “Craters” “This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album. I was assessing all the songs and I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is a super-heavy record.’ [Laughs] I also wanted to write a song from the headspace that I was finding myself in more and more, which was this kind of darkly humorous place where I was starting to get a bit more distance from it and go, ‘This is not how I imagined things would end up, and it’s a bit embarrassing that everyone seems to know, and I can’t quite escape my new reality. It’s like I’m walking around with a big hole in my chest that everyone can see through.’ I wanted to express a bit of that lightness. It is also about looking at this big hole in my life and going, it’s all just part of the story.” “The In-Between” “It’s about trying to accept that you’re in this uncomfortable in-between space and learning to be OK with that. Some of the more hopeful songs on the album are about trying to look at my situation and see the positives in it and accept the unknown. Musically, I was listening to Angie McMahon’s album [2023’s Light, Dark, Light Again] quite a lot and that inspired this song. I picked up the guitar not long after.” “The Second Act” “This song was probably the first turning point for me when I had written a bunch of the more sombre songs on the album, when I was really indulging my sadder side. I made a conscious decision to look at myself in the mirror and go, ‘What are the potential positives of this, and how can we look at this a different way?’. That’s when I realised, I’m 40, so I’m at the beginning of the second act of my life, and we don’t get many chances for reinventions in this life, or new beginnings. And I realised I was probably ready to close the last chapter and start looking ahead and trying to see things in a more optimistic way. I badly needed to let go of a lot of the guilt and shame I was holding onto and admit to myself that I was merely human, and we’re all just fumbling through life trying to figure out how the hell to do all the right things.” “Don’t Make Me Love You” “I wrote this song on the baritone guitar. It has a little bit of an alt-country feel to me, and I wanted it to sound a little bit Cowboy Junkies, like there was just a few people in the room with some reverb, playing the song live. It turned out to be one of my favourite feels on the album. There’s just an effortlessness to this song.” “The Broken Ones” “I was quite obsessed with figuring out how I could not keep making the same mistakes and how I managed to keep falling for people who were obviously not right for me in the long term. It occurred to me that I’m always drawn to people who are a little bit broken and a little bit unhinged, and that I find that quality really alluring. Then I thought, ‘I’ve never felt like I was particularly normal or conventional either’, so I guess it’s a song about realising that that’s my pattern and trying to figure out how to break that pattern because like I say in the song, ‘I’m a life jacket made of concrete.’ These people that I’m attracted to are probably looking at me to save them, and I have absolutely no ability to because I’m just as messed up as they are.” “Story for the Ages” “This is the first one I wrote for the album. And it took me a long time to write, because it had taken me about a year after the relationship ended to be able to write at all. I felt like I didn’t know how to articulate what I was going through and where I was. It took me a long time to realise how strong a narrative I must have written for myself and that I was still very much in denial that I couldn’t make that story work. It’s a song mourning the loss of the future I thought I was going to have. It was a real exorcism that had to happen, to get those words out of me, because that was a really hard thing to admit to myself.” “Hush Now” “It’s for my son. This is the only song on the album that was written a little while ago; I wrote this a few years ago. It just felt like it fit on this album. I wrote it about that feeling that your kids are growing up so fast, and year by year they slowly drift away. And me being the emotional person that I am I started looking into the future and realising that he’ll be his own person one day and completely independent, and hoping he still likes me and wants to come and visit. Parenting is a very slow letting go of your children, and it’s devastating to think about sometimes.” “Blue Velvet Dress” “‘Blue Velvet Dress’ is the story of the night that my partner and I broke up. I was playing the ABC New Year’s Eve broadcast, and we’d broken up and I had to play on live television for millions of people across Australia. I’d been crying all day and I had almost no voice by the time I went onstage. Then afterwards, as the fireworks were going off over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, my band and I just huddled and hugged each other and I cried. It was beautiful. It made me realise that life goes on and I still have these amazing friendships. It felt very much like the fireworks were bringing in a new beginning for me and I was letting go of the old chapter. It’s called ‘Blue Velvet Dress’ because I was wearing a blue velvet dress that night, and that dress came to represent the old version of me that I needed to let go of.”