Missy Higgins.
Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of The Sound of White Album.. Festival Theatre. Adelaide Festival Centre. June 21 2024.
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
Her songs are the songs of experience, honest and pure in tone and welling with forceful voice from the heart. Some like The Battle recall a feud with another singer/songwriter from which she emerges the victor. Songs of Independence recall the struggles, the pain of separation, the confrontation with guilt and shame and ultimately the conquest of the independent spirit. There is confession and revelation in her narrative. The lyrics, poetic and dynamic reveal a woman striving for individual strength in Stay Away or attempting to answer a five year old’s questions of confusion in A Complicated Truth. From keyboard to guitar, Missy Higgins traverses a life of lows and highs, all the time keeping the audience transfixed by her anecdotal prelude to her song. At the piano she explores the woeful ballad. At the guitar she discovers the upbeat quality of the chord structure and the positive persuasion of the strumming. Backed by four singer/musicians, Missy Higgins leads the audience through her life in song. Her artistry is unique. Her engagement with the audience warm and generous
There is entertainment in the story of her Grey’s Anatomy song used during the sequence when an ambulance flips upside down and careers into the hospital with a bleeding patient inside. She remembers a song about infidelity unwittingly used at a wedding ceremony. Her songs of memory reverberate with struggle and yet through it all, the confusion and the insecurity, Missy Higgins’ songs are signposts to self compassion and self determination. At the end of the first half the confident singer/songwriter is ready for what comes next.
In the second half, Missy Higgins, bouncing onto stage in a white cowgirl outfit with short skirt and long red boots is backed by musicians in white, playing cello, guitar, percussion and drums, trumpet and double bass . Beams of white light flood the stage or shoot narrow rays of light from spots above.. Images of lyrics flash across the cyclarama behind images of wafting material. They change during the songs to flowers, palm trees, a nest with birds and scenes from foreign lands. The show is transformed into a theatrical sensation. Missy Higgins returns to the account of her interesting life from the time she was discovered when she won a competition on Triple J Unearthed. She dwells on the dark in songs like The River, in which a young girl leaves home, goes to the river and never returns or the horror of Night Tme.
Throughout the repertoire one senses the strength of a woman who has faced adversity and confronted it head on. It is in the song that she wrote in response to Deborah Mailman’s character in Total Control.
From the jazzy funk number Casualty with the trumpet solo to Escaping Reality, Missy Higgins songs and music search for an answer to the eternal question “Who am ?”I. The Sound of White , celebrating her 20 years as an extraordinary and remarkable singer, lyricist and musician provides part of the answer. Her song to her young daughter, her tribute to her cousin and her generosity and affection towards her audience dancing in their rows and singing her choruses are all part of the answer. The magic of this special celebration has cast its spell and the audience leap to their feet in appreciation of a night they will always remember.