Missy Higgins’ ‘The Second Act’ Starts at No. 1: ‘I Poured My Absolute Heart Out’
Missy Higgins enjoys a dream start with The Second Act, which blasts to No. 1 on the ARIA Chart.
With that effort, Higgins becomes only the seventh Australian artist in history to have No. 1 albums in at least three consecutive decades.
Written in the shadows of a painful breakup with her ex, The Second Act (via Eleven/EMI) has been described as the sequel to The Sound Of White, which dropped 20 years ago and which logged seven non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 — en route to 12-times platinum certification.
On writing The Second Act, “I was in such a tricky place, I was going through a real reckoning,” Higgins recently told Rolling Stone Australia.
“I was having a real existential crisis. I was trying to figure out who I was without the identity of being in this marriage and who I was. What my story was going to look like now that this kind of narrative that I had for myself had kind of burnt to the ground. How I was gonna go forward into such an unknown and kind of terrifying place?”
The Second Act debuts at the summit of the ARIA Chart published Friday, Sept. 13, for her fourth No. 1, a tally that includes On A Clear Night (from 2007) and third LP The Ol’ Razzle Dazzle (2012), while Oz (2014), Solastalgia (2018) and Total Control (2022) all entered the top 3. Higgins’ career retrospective The Special Ones topped out at No. 7 in 2018.
“I could not be happier or more grateful,” Higgins says of her latest best-seller. “This album was just so important to me and I just want to say a massive thank you to all the fans. I’m so touched. I wanted this No. 1 more than any other album I think. It’s 20 years since The Sound of White went No. 1 so I feel like the luckiest person alive to still be doing what I do to this day. Thank-you guys too much. This means the world to me.”
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“I could not be more happy. I just feel so incredibly grateful,” she says in a social post. “It gives me so much faith in the music industry in Australia that an album this raw, and this unpolished, and honest can go No. 1. I just recorded it in my house, in a back room. And I poured my absolute heart out. I think that I wanted this No. 1 more than any other album I released.”
A nine-time ARIA Award-winner, Higgins will be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame during the 2024 ARIAs, set for Nov. 20 at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney. Three days later, she embarks on the “encore” leg of her “The Second Act” tour, which has sold more than 80,000 tickets, according to Frontier Touring.
The Second Act is the fifth homegrown album to scale the chart mountain in the past two months, a line-up that includes recordings by Lime Cordiale, Tones And I, Amy Shark and Cold Chisel.