Coming up from down under

Think Aimee Mann cross-pollinated with Suzanne Vega. Think Sarah McLachlan, but Australian. Make all the comparisons necessary, but it's still hard to pin down Missy Higgins' sound.\nDiscovered by a radio station's demo contest while still in high school, Higgins took a year off to backpack around Europe with some friends instead of rushing off to record an album. When she finally did, the album, "The Sound of White," debuted at No. 1 in Australia. It's since been certified platinum. The 21-year-old singer will be touring with Howie Day and Gavin DeGraw this summer, and will be making a stop at the Egyptian Room in Indianapolis Tuesday, July 12. \nBefore she left Australia to start the tour, Missy took a few minutes to talk about life, love and her upcoming shows.\nYour style is hard to pin down. Who would you say some of your influences were as you developed that sound?\nI don't know, it's hard for me to pin down my influences. I listened to such a range of music growing up, my dad was playing classical music, very early on. Then my brother got me into jazz, and I went through a grunge rock period, and then an Australian rock period. When I wrote the very first song on the album ("All for Believing"), I think I was listening to a lot of Sarah McLachlan at the time, and some Australian rock. I can't remember exactly, the only real thread is the jazz I've listened to for quite a long time.\nWho's in you CD player right now?\nThe new Coldplay album, actually. I love it. I also just bought Nina Simone Sings the Blues.\nJazz is your background. Who are some of the other jazz classics you've tapped into? \nElla Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn ... Natalie Cole was the first jazz CD my brother ever bought me.\nYour brother was a big influence in your love of jazz?\nYeah, he pretty much got me started. I started jazz when I was in high school.\nYour Web site tells the story of you losing your guitar when you were in Spain. Did you ever get it back?\nNo, I didn't. I left it on top of a baggage carousel on a train, and when I got off at the next stop, at my destination, I think I discovered it all of a sudden, and I went to the lost property desk and they kind of just shook their heads and laughed, and said, 'There's no way you're going to get that back.'\nSo you just got another guitar?\nWell, it wasn't a very good guitar. Though it was my first, so it had a bit of importance there.\nYour accent isn't as strong when you're speaking as when you're singing. Do you think it'll appeal to audiences that you sound so Australian?\nI don't know, it seems to have gone down well so far, with this small audience. I think as with every type of audience, with anything that's kind of distinctive, there'll be people who hate it and people that love it. I love that people have strong opinions. Anything that conjures up strong opinions, it's got to be a good thing. It makes me different.\nYou're touring with Howie Day and Gavin DeGraw. Do you know either of them?\nNo, I don't. I mean, I've heard Gavin's single and I've heard Howie's album, so I know their music, but I don't know either of them personally.\nWill it be strange going on the road with these two guys you don't know?\nNo, it'll be ok. I've done it a load of times before. I've supported so many artists on the road. At first they're a bit standoffish, but once you've been doing the same thing for a few shows, you start talking and bonding. \nWhat's your writing process like?\nUsually I'm just kind of playing around on guitar or piano. I'm basically just improvising and humming along, and something just forms itself in front of me. It just kind of falls out. It just kind of happens. I don't really know how it happens, but one minute I'm playing along and singing along, just humming or making up words as I go. And then words form in my mouth and I'm singing without really thinking about what I'm saying, and before I know it, I've kind of got a song. I usually get the melody done before I get the lyrics done, so that's usually the basis for the lyrics. All of the melody, and then I go back and pick up the lyrics. \nEverything that was mentioned in your bio mentions that you won a radio contest that led to your discovery. How did that all come about?\nMy sister entered my song into the competition. She told me, but I had never heard of it and I was at boarding school at the time. She told me she and her boyfriend thought I should enter "All For Believing" into this radio station. I basically said, "OK, that'd be great. Thanks." I had to whip up a small bio, a small paragraph about myself, and I got a phone call a few months later saying I'd won the competition. I didn't really know what that meant. I soon realized that it was quite a big deal, since my song was about to get on the radio. Most of the people at my school had heard of the competition. From getting my song on the radio, I ended up signing a record deal. \nThe bios all also mention that you decided to take some time off and not jump right into recording an album.\nI'd been planning to go backpacking in Europe with my friend, we'd been saving up and been planning for years, and we'd really wanted to do when we finished school. So we'd been planning it long before I got the record deal, and it wasn't something I wanted to give up. I thought, I need time to prepare for this first album. You only ever get one shot at your first album, and I wanted to make it the best that I could. I knew I needed to take my time with it. I basically said to the record company that I wanted to take a year off before I started writing and recording. That was one of the prerequisites, before I signed with the record company, that was one of the things I had to be allowed to do. It was a good decision. I'm glad I did it.\nWhat was your favorite place in Europe?\nThe first thing that comes to mind is Spain. We stayed there for a couple weeks; I had a great time there. I loved Barcelona. Also Switzerland -- so beautiful. We kind of found this little town halfway up a mountain, it looked like it was completely untouched by the modern world. They had donkeys pulling carts, it was just beautiful. Everything was so colorful, so vibrant, because it was so far away from smoggy cities.\nHow do you think that trip to Europe influenced this first album?\nI didn't actually write any of the songs on the trip, I just got a lot of general creative inspiration while I was over there. I didn't end up writing any songs about the trip, but while I was away, I just got a bigger perspective on life. It seemed to put everything into focus. While I was sitting on the side of a mountain in Switzerland, just overlooking this beautiful land, I was thinking, wow, I'm so small in the scheme of things. Getting a record deal is pretty amazing, but it doesn't make me queen of the universe. I've been given that, but it's part of the whole journey. It seemed to calm me down a lot, and I saw myself as this little speck on a ball rather than thinking I was center of the universe. \nWhen the album hit, it kind of exploded onto the scene. It debuted at No. 1.\nYeah, my first single, "Scar," did really well on the radio. From that, there was a lot of building up for the album release. I'd been selling CDs at concerts and touring a lot, so that helped too. \nYou mentioned that you went off to boarding school.\nYeah, I was 12 or 13. My brothers and sisters had both been to boarding school, so I was just following in their footsteps, although I left earlier than they did. I just had this craving for independence. The school I was at only had five other girls my age, so I was a bit restless, you know. I felt like boarding school was the big wide world. I just loved the idea of having independence. There were so many other people, it was so exciting.\nAnd it was there that your interest in music blossomed.\nThe good thing about it was that at boarding school, you have a lot of free time. Like on weekends when you're not allowed to go home, you just hang around. I just kind of gravitated toward the music school, which had a bunch of booths with pianos. On the weekends, I just kind of ended up locking myself away and writing songs. It was very good in that aspect. \nYour album gets pretty dark at times. Where do you think that comes from? \nI don't know, it's just me. I think everyone has a dark side, I think mine just materializes in the form of a song. I don't think I'm any darker than anyone else, I just manage to make a career out of making them into songs. When I was young, I went through shy introverted phases, and I've always been someone who thinks about things a lot. When I was young, I was always writing in my journal and thinking about the meaning of life and such, and where I was going, and why things were the way they were. I had a very happy and stable upbringing, but I just have an inquisitive mind.\nThe album is very raw, very emotional. Is it intimidating to lay yourself bare for your audience?\nNo, it's actually very therapeutic to be able to write a very personal song and play it for hundreds of people. It's very cathartic to be able to express yourself and have others relate to it. But at the same time, I don't write about specifics. \nOn a lot of them, there is this unspecified "he." Any tortured romances that materialized on this album?\nOh, there've been a couple. But there was one specific that materialized on quite a few of the songs. It was a relationship that was very worthwhile as far as getting songs out of it. Out of every bad relationship comes a few good songs.