From the corridor of uncertainty to the hall of fame might not sound like far, at least architecturally, but it is some journey for a few artists. Too far for most.
Too soon for others? Well …
Anyway, set down in the middle of the culture discourse last week, not exactly by her own hand – though, to be fair, no one forced her there either – Missy Higgins didn’t just become the next member of the Australian music industry’s penthouse suite/museum, but reminded everyone it is 20 years since she released her first album.
On that note, Wind Back Wednesday enters the time machine to that very year, 2004, and that very album, The Sound Of White, and asks, Missy, did you get here?
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A TRIPLE J DISCOVERY AT 16, a major label signing at 17 and a number one single at 21, a month before the arrival of her debut album this week, suggests folk/pop singer Missy Higgins is either very lucky or very wise, or both. But Higgins didn’t always make the right calls.
When she was 12 she quit not just practising but playing the piano she’d been studying since she was six and then begged her parents to allow her to attend a boarding school because she thought it would give her more independence than living at home.
She was quickly disabused of the latter naïve notion upon arriving at the very traditional and rule-heavy Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, which her older brother and sister had attended. Realising the error of giving up the piano took a bit longer.
“I never practised but my parents made me practise half an hour at night and that’s why I rebelled and quit when I was about 13,” Higgins says now. “And then after a year or two without it I realised I enjoyed it but I didn’t enjoy being forced to practise. I realised that I didn’t like the classical I’d been made to play either so I started learning jazz.”
You didn’t like being told what to do?
“Yeah, I guess so. It didn’t make music enjoyable to me.”
Seriously young looking – she could pass for 15 with pale, unblemished skin and a narrow, slim frame – Higgins can suggest she’s curling herself around her legs in the manner of a shy teenager without really moving. She picks at her nails nervously and gazes off into the middle distance when not forced to answer directly.
But there’s a solid core of confidence here too that doesn’t take long to tap, though it rarely bubbles up in anything as coarse as brashness. You’d be foolish to mistake the remaining vestiges of teenage diffidence for either indifference or anything more than a natural level of insecurity in this third child of a doctor and a child care centre operator.
Maybe there’s something to be said for boarding schools being the saviour of a quiet child for according to Higgins her time at Geelong Grammar (where her fees were funded by an inheritance from her grandmother) was not exactly a whirl of social activities.
“I was pretty introverted and spent all my time in the music school. Every bit of free time I got I would go to the music school and lock myself in the room with a piano,” she says, adding that the music rooms were soundproof so no one could hear you sing. Or scream.
“There was a lot of intensity about boarding school, being in each other’s faces 24 hours a day. Hormones and emotions running around everywhere, particularly in the girl’s dormitory. I had the most intense relationship with the girls: you’d have screaming fights but your friendships would always be so strong. And you have to escape that, have to get away on your own.
“I don’t know how anyone who didn’t play music got away.”
In was in one of those lunchtime sessions, a few hours before the deadline, that the 15-year-old Higgins wrote her first complete song as part of a class assignment. (She’d written a few half songs before then which, disturbingly to her, sounded like Celine Dion numbers. We’re never going to be allowed to hear them.)
The song was All For Believing, the one which her sister would eventually send in to Triple J’s Unearthed competition for unsigned artists. It earned her an A and another chance to perform before her classmates.
Interestingly, for all her introversion, performing held no terrors for Higgins whose main interest was jazz piano, inspired by the brother she openly idolised who by then was a working, if starving, jazz musician.
By the time she sang the first notes of All For Believing for fellow students she had already sung with her brother’s group, her favourite numbers being Moon Over Vermont and Cry Me A River (Julie London, not Justin Timberlake). And anyway, a classroom or even school body wasn’t close to what was going on in her head.
“It wasn’t so much that I thought I could sing but I loved it so much,” Higgins says. “I used to have fantasies of singing in front of a sea of people, Woodstock kinda size. I used to dream about it at night. I didn’t how I was going to do it. I didn’t think I’d be doing it with my own stuff.”
The idea of performing was one thing; the reality of songwriting was something altogether different. All For Believing had come literally at the last minute, borne out of desperation and the product of a set of forces the 15-year-old didn’t understand and certainly did not know how to reproduce.
Just what was required was driven home to her when a year later, on the advice of a family friend, she shopped her song and herself to a Melbourne-based record company. His first question was where are the rest of your songs? Her answer was I don’t know.
She began to nut out a few more songs, surprising herself that first of all it could happen again and secondly that the songs didn’t, well, suck. But before she could doorknock again she won Unearthed and the knocks were happening at her door.
Two major labels, Sony (home of Delta Goodrem) and EMI (via Silverchair manager John Watson’s label Eleven) courted her. It was at the very least perplexing to the schoolgirl.
“My sister entered [the song] into Unearthed and I don’t know if I would have done something otherwise,” confesses Higgins. “I never had that much of a desire to get a record deal. It wasn’t something I thought was a reality, a possibility. The kind of people I thought got record deals were pop stars and dancers - glamorous people.”
What’s your dancing like?
“I can’t dance,” she laughs, alarmingly making herself look younger still. “I’m completely uncoordinated, which is why it’s really good that on stage I’m either behind a piano or a guitar and I don’t have to move. I wasn’t born with the rhythm in my limbs.”
In part the then-17-year-old Higgins chose Eleven/EMI because they were quite happy to accede to her request for time to travel. In fact, they encouraged her to take the time to learn and develop – so much so that it was another four years before her debut album, The Sound Of White, was ready. (“It’s what you do if you want a long-term career: you take it slowly,” says Higgins.)
And in part it was because they promised one key thing: they weren’t looking for another Delta or Kylie or, heaven forbid, Holly.
“A lot of it was to do with the fact that I was very headstrong about the fact that I was not going to be made into a pop star,” Higgins says, chewing out the words pop star as if they were a curse.
While her own songs at this stage tend to fall into either the kind of folk/pop being made popular by the Waifs or ballads that aren’t a million miles from the likes of Goodrem, Higgins’ heroes are relatively unknown but intense singer/songwriters such as Patty Griffin, Ron Sexsmith and Rufus Wainwright.
Her explanation of their appeal suggests her own career may have higher aspirations than this year’s pop idol.
“It’s that raw honesty I guess,” Higgins says. “I don’t really like easy listening that’s mindless and numbs you. I find that dishonest and I don’t really connect with it at all.”
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