Fans of Missy Higgins (and they are legion) know her to be a musician who can wear her heart not just on her sleeve, but emblazoned in neon on a piece of material and run up the flag pole for everyone to see. It’s what made her debut album The Sound of White such an all-conquering hit when she released it in 2004 and the lead single ‘Scar’ also soar to number one on the Australian charts.
Later albums have seen similar success, and have also mined her own life and relationships for material, though Oz from 2014 was a covers album, released with a book of the same name comprising a series of Higgins’ essays.
The downside of being so open about your personal life in your work, however, is that everyone knows your business. Ruthie Foster and host Sarah Carroll discussed how this is such a double-edged sword of life in a small town when they were chatting in the Women Out Loud event at Port Fairy Folk Festival last weekend, but for someone with the platform of a Missy Higgins, the size of the town is irrelevant – the whole world knows what’s happening in her life.
And, most pertinently, recent events have included the 2022 break-up of her relationship and her transition to single motherhood. In true Higgins style, this sequence of events has given her the material for her sixth studio album and most recent release, The Second Act.
With song titles like ‘You Should Run’, ‘When 4 Became 3’, ‘The Broken Ones’ and ‘Don’t Make Me Love You’, it’s an album of a broken heart and a fractured family.
And with Higgins headlining in her (surprisingly) first ever appearance at Port Fairy Folk Festival for one show only on Friday 8 March, the crowd would have been forgiven for being nervous in advance that they were about to witness all of that angst and sadness writ large on stage.
But that’s absolutely not what we got. Yes, she played a sizeable chunk of The Second Act, including achingly poignant tracks like ‘A Complicated Truth’ – with its brilliantly incisive lyrics describing a conversation with a small child wondering why their parents are no longer living together, but for Higgins the very act of writing and recording the songs is like therapy for her, she told us.
And performing them for such an appreciative crowd is just the icing on the cake. The packed Shebeen tent (with a huge contingent who had to be content with remaining outside, simply unable to squeeze in) was clearly full of those who, if they weren’t fans before the show, certainly were by the end.
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As she swapped between guitar and keyboards, the banter was top notch too, with Higgins actually asking the audience for their permission to play songs from the new album (who does that?) and apologising when it was time for another sad one. She also made time to chat about her love for previous Folkie stars The Waifs, who were the ones who gave her the confidence to sing in her own Aussie accent.
Higgins was in fine voice, excellent spirits – “I’m actually quite a happy person” – and performed a terrific set, culminating in a rousing almost sing-along version of ‘Scar’.
Missy Higgins played one show only at Port Fairy Folk Festival on Friday 8 March.
