Review Summary: No-fault divorce.
Mature break-up albums are a rare thing. Partly, one suspects that this is because writers know that audiences do not find grown-up emotional processing anywhere near as delightful and salacious as glass-hurling tantrums.
Steve Nicks painting Lindsey Buckingham as a spoiled little cokehead rich boy? Hell yes.
Bob Dylan fantasising about Sara Lownds dying in a ditch? Ooh, it’s the poet laureate coming off his pedestal in a fit of petty viciousness.
Taylor Swift all but donning Prospero’s robes as she commands the forces of her fandom to sling their asps and arrows at Jake Gyllenhaal? Friendship group goss playing out for the world to see.
Maybe it is not the nature of artistic types to deal with break-ups the way in which we normal people do. And that is what makes Missy Higgins’ fifth LP
The Second Act such a striking work.
Higgins was a darling of Australian pop in the noughties, a star on arrival with her 2004 debut album
The Sound of White and its timeless hat-trick of singles ‘Scar’, ‘The Special Two’ and ‘Ten Days’. Twenty years on, Higgins is held in high regard as an artist although none of her subsequent work has reached the commercial or critical heights of her lead-off LP.
The driving force of the lyrics of
The Second Act are her divorce from Dan Lee, her husband of six years and the father of her two children, and navigating life after the fact (the bridge between a depressive present and a hopeful future is conveyed on the album art, which finds Higgins lying in bed in a dark room with a sliver of sunlight cracking on her face). It is not an album with animosity or finger-pointing exercises and, yes, it is heavy on gloom and tragedy but these themes do not come without admissions of personal flaw.
This is most notable in the frankness of the opening song ‘You Should Run’, which would make many listeners do a double-take. Taking the unusual narrative stand-point of addressing a potential new suitor, Higgins strips back the drama and the romance and lays being a newly-single mother-of-two all out in the open with a chorus that sings, “Loving me will never be simple, babe/These four little hands pull me a million ways/Loving me will never be fun/You'll never be my number one.”
‘The Complicated Truth’ is to Higgins and
The Second Act what Adele’s ‘My Little Love’ was to her own post-divorce album
30: a mother’s attempt to help her child understand what divorce means even as she herself is struggling to make sense of it. “You've been asking lots of questions lately, trying to figure out/Why the endings in your books don't match ours/And it breaks my heart trying to find some words you'll understand/’Cause, baby, nothing about this was in the plan.” It is arresting and creative and engaging, arguably the high-point on an album full of songs befitting all those adjectives.
One of the less surprising elements of
The Second Act is that Higgins leans heavily on her trusty piano for its emotionally racked and sombre side. The most notable departure is ‘Craters’, which leaps upward with a jaunty acoustic guitar and an obvious allegory of the narrator having a hole in her front hall that all guests must politely step around and not draw attention towards (it’s Higgins’ attempt to inject a touch of humour, dark as it may have been). Higgins described her determination to establish a point in the album where the songs look to move forward in life to Apple Music: “I’m 40, 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 … 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.”
Maybe that’s why mature break-up albums are a rare thing. Not just because they’re not as fun to listen to, but because they take a lot more character to write.
