There is perhaps no Australian artist as fascinated with transformation as Missy Higgins. Scar, her signature song, explores change under coercion: “A triangle trying to squeeze through a circle / He tried to cut me so I’d fit.” But even her more affirming ballads explore the terrible giddiness of becoming something new. “When you’re young you have this image of your life,” she sings on The Special Two, an ode to the freeing sting of abandoning teenage fantasies for new ones.
Forget the hits, though: the song that most clearly explains the worldview of a singer whose pop culture status has always obscured her cutting-edge strangeness is The River, in which the young narrator tries to wash herself clean, only to discover that flirting with evolution always means flirting with a sort of death.
