"You can't really write your own story. You've just got to surrender to whatever happens. And I have no idea what the future holds."
When I meet Missy Higgins on a cold Melbourne morning at Bakehouse Studios, she's come ready to talk. The beloved Australian songwriter, who we first met as a teenager when she won triple j's Unearthed competition in 2001, has grown with us. Yet while crafting songs that have been a soundtrack in our lives, Missy's own experiences have both fuelled and derailed her greatest passion.
We're sitting down to Take 5, a long-running radio segment and podcast that I'm bringing to ABC TV for the first time. Missy and I have spoken many times over the years, and I've always held her in high regard as one of our greatest songwriters and performers. I've often observed that the Missy Higgins the public sees is not the Missy she sees herself. Exploring that, I asked her to pick five songs around the theme of "identity".
A couple of weeks earlier, Missy had posted about her marriage separation on Instagram. The end of her relationship to playwright and father of their two children Dan Lee, had stirred a lot of feelings.
She spoke of the shame of a failed marriage, a "fairy tale in cinders". When she emailed me her song choices, her final pick was the song she walked down the aisle to.
"I had this dream and this story written out for myself about marriage and about how you stick it out, that fairy tale of being together and talking about the good old days", she shares in one of Bakehouse's rehearsal rooms.
"Being in a culture that really celebrates longevity, I wanted to be one of those people. I wanted to be successful at this. The one that managed to do it. And it just didn't work out that way."
Missy Higgins holds very high expectations for herself. The period in which she wrote her debut single All For Believing was filled with anxiety.
"I remember having a collapse at one point and having to go to hospital and they didn't know what was wrong with me," she says.
"I found it so hard to figure out who I was.
"Everyone was telling me that this is the most important time of your life, this will set you up for life. It was too much pressure, my little brain just couldn't handle it. Thank God I had music."
Those songs would set her up for a number one debut album [2004's The Sound Of White], sold out tours, and international travel. But they would also shape who she was to the world, and build expectations she felt she had to meet.
After two albums written without the gaze of the public eye, the success of The Sound of White and its 2007 follow-up On A Clear Night brought back the anxiety of her teenage years.
"There is so much pressure to not let people down," Missy says.
"You've also got thousands of people who think they know you and think they know your sound and are expecting a certain thing from you. When they come up to you, they're not seeing you.
"They're seeing their idea of you or what they've created in their mind that you represent for them."
At the same time, Missy's understanding of herself was going through a metamorphosis, as she fell in love for the first time with a woman while on tour in America. Rumours of her relationship abounded, media tried to trick her into saying "she" when she spoke of her dating life, and all of it was happening before Missy had come out as bisexual to the closest people in her life.
When she did, she felt empowered.
"It enabled me to start being more open about it, because I realised I had a language for it," she says.
"It's not something that I'm hiding, it's not something I'm ashamed of. It's a part of who I am."
Missy Higgins' biggest hit, Scar', has been touted as a queer anthem. Regardless of its genesis, the song is another reminder of the intangible nature of magical songwriting and the associated fear that one day the taps will turn off.
For a long while they did, as Missy struggled with one of the longest bouts of writer's block in her career.
"I was trying to find out who I was without all of the facade that had been built up over the years," she explains. "I was trying to throw that away, scrape everything away, and figure out who I was underneath it all.
"If I'd never written Scar, if I'd never released anything. What would my sound be? What would be the sound of my soul?"
During that period, Missy only listened to music without lyrics. Hearing someone else's prose in song would make her unravel by comparison of worth. It was a dark time, so much so that she can't listen to the music she would play during those months.
She stared at her piano and asked the big questions.
"Am I worth anything without music, when you strip it all away? Who am I? Am I worth anything? Is there any point to any of it?"
Missy Higgins has told a lot of stories, to us and to herself. Today I sit down with her, candid and still a little bruised, but clear and hopeful for the future. A future she knows is impossible to predict, and even more so, to control.
"I guess I'll probably write an album about all of this, but I've got to have a second to myself first" she laughs.
"I was this married woman with a nuclear family and that was my identity. Now, that's not me anymore. I've got to start again. And there's a good opportunity in that because actually, that was nothing to do with who I am. That was just part of the story.
"All of these things, they're all part of the story. Who am I underneath it all? That's kind of an exciting journey, you know? Anything could happen."
See which five songs shaped Missy Higgins' identity on Take 5 with Zan Rowe: Tuesday night at 8pm on ABC TV and streaming on ABC iview
