“We should be selling tissues at the merch stand.”
It’s with these words that Australiana icon Missy Higgins began her show at Anita’s Theatre in Thirroul on the 4th of April. She very unassumingly took the stage as the house lights went down, and instead of starting with a song, she said hello. It was such a small choice.
“Hello! Just waiting in the wings for the lights to go down. How are y’all?”
It felt so humbling to not begin with a song, but with a greeting.
Humble is a beautiful way to describe Missy Higgins. Rocketing to Australian legend status in the early 2000s with her first record, The Sound of White, Higgins has permeated my life for as long as I can remember. My sisters were both massive fans of her from the jump, but it’s only been the last few years that I’ve started to truly appreciate her discography. Her show, as part of the Great Southern Nights performance set, was a one-night-only blend of songs ranging from that first album to the ballads that pad out her latest, The Second Act (2024).
It was this album that was the lynchpin of the show. She told us that we’d been given the honour of hearing most of these songs live for the first time since festival audiences don’t particularly want to hear sad ballads about divorce.
My first tears for the night came from Blue Velvet Dress. Recalling the day she broke up with her husband, wearing the titular blue velvet dress before performing under the Harbour Bridge for New Year’s Eve, she exposes the mess of memory — how the hurt of a single moment can bleed into an outfit, a location, a day.
“I’ve been stuck at New Year’s Eve 2021, and it’s killing me.”
I actually bought a blue velvet dress the day before the show. I don’t want to get stuck wearing it, either.
The hardest sobs, though, came from A Complicated Truth, a song for her six-year-old daughter with a simple premise: “I’ll always love your daddy, cause together we made you”.
‘Simple’ seems like an easy way to describe Higgins’ songwriting, but I think ‘clarified’ feels more apt. You could hear it in songs as early as the first album deep cut Ten Days, sappily recalling the tenth day after a break-up where “you’re still the only one who feels like home”. You could still feel the precision of emotion in songs like The In-Between, her voice soaring and burning, as she questions when life gets better, and as she asks when living in the in-between – living in that awful, liminal, necessary moment between the tragedies that have just befallen you and the life that awaits you – will finally end.
“I’m not who I used to be, not yet who I’ll become. This is the in-between, I guess.”
Most of these newer songs were played with her and a piano, but the larger songs had life breathed into them by a padded-out band. The solace of a song like Everyone’s Waiting played beautifully as the second song on the setlist with just Higgins on stage, but recent hits like her Like a Version cover of Troye Sivan’s One of Your Girls (which was an absolutely surprising pleasure to see live) blossomed with the support of a full stage. Her band was phenomenal, completely in sync with every song, and they felt so purposeful in each moment they were part of. Every harmony floated across Higgin’s voice, thickly laden with an Aussie accent; powerful, richly flexible, and pure.
I especially loved the backing singer with the opalescent, flowing white gown, which my sister and I both wanted to steal for ourselves. Higgins herself was decked out in a silver shirt with puffy sleeves, which she told us she thrifted on the day in Thirroul. It’s such a specific detail, but it felt so core to what Higgins stands for as an artist.
I honestly have never felt so wholly consumed as an audience member at a show. I filmed a lone snippet of a single song and then did not touch my phone for the rest of the performance. Rarely a light came from the audience. Sneaky pictures and videos abandoned in favour of feeling the music in the moment. When she came to the penultimate Scar, the ultimate bisexual anthem, it was the first time everyone in the audience truly sang along. It wasn’t because people didn’t know the words, but because people wanted to hear her.
Perhaps it was the demographic of middle-aged to older outback Aussies that predominantly composed the audience, generations who don’t feel that compulsive gen z need to document everything for fear of losing a memory, but there was something in the air that night that drew me to a feeling of presentness. I had spent the whole day anxious and in my head about anything and everything, and the stress of uni was starting to boil my body alive. But the second Higgins walked onto that stage and waved, I felt the stress dissipate, if only for the few hours we had with her.
As the final guitar strum of the night began, and as the soaring heights of Steer enveloped us in bliss, I felt every planet in the solar system align, every heartbeat synchronise with the pulse of the Earth, and every choice I’d ever made come to fruition. I felt like I took the steering wheel again, without realising I’d ever let go.
“Your heart is fierce, and now you finally know that you control where you go. You can steer.”
