I first heard Australia’s Missy Higgins a few years ago when I lived in Cape Town and she was touring South Africa. I remember her having some adorable anecdotes about game reserves and the touristy experience of this end of the world.
I remember turning up late for the show that night with my boyfriend at the time, and I was unhappy about that and about being with him at all, but I was trying not to be on both accounts.
I was wading through one of those periods that you look back on and realise were set up all wrong to begin with, but while you’re in them, the only clue you have is the very vaguest sense of discord – like putting on a coat that looks like yours but definitely isn’t, and then getting home and realising it, and wondering what you were thinking.
Anyway, there was lots of thick, cloudy confusion at the time, but I remember getting to the gig and finding my friends and then finding Missy Higgins, and hearing something completely lucid and clear in everything she sang, in the midst of my own idiotic tempest.
She’s with Joshua Radin in this video, covering Patty Griffin (with whom I’ve been smitten for a few weeks now, and who I’m quite sure will be the soundtrack to this winter).
Griffin famously guest appeared on Joshua Radin’s You’ve Got Growing Up To Do.
Which comes full circle quite nicely for me, since his We Were Here album was the soundtrack to my first winter here in Johannesburg.
It’s comforting how things have a way of settling the upset all by themselves, isn’t it?
Forty years go by with someone laying in your bed
Forty years of things you say you wish you’d never said
How hard would it have been to say some kinder words instead
I wonder as I stare up at the sky turning red
