The Australian-born singer Missy Higgins, who first took to the piano at the age of 6, has discovered a new instrument to write songs: the guitar.
For her latest work, “On a Clear Night,” Higgins composed the majority of her tunes on the stringed instrument and from the first notes you can hear the emergence of a new direction - in terms of tempo, lyrical content and a newfound sense of clarity - as compared to her last work “The Sound of White.”
“I usually sit down at the piano when I'm feeling somber and I feel like writing a ballad, and I usually pick up the guitar when I want to write something a bit more angst-ridden because you tend to write with rhythm when writing on a guitar,” said Higgins.
The Melbourne native actually wrote most of the songs for the new album while on the road in support of “The Sound of White” and had only the portable guitar to express her musical ideas.
“I wanted these songs to tell a story in the most beautiful way possible,” she said. “All of my songs have a sense of a narrative to them, I guess, and I wanted to really put that in the forefront and allow the songs to build and allow the songs to kind of speak for themselves.”
