Songfacts®:

• Missy Higgins' post-divorce album, The Second Act, is about the stories we tell ourselves that have unexpected endings. For the Australian singer-songwriter, the story she told herself was one of a long and happy marriage to her husband, comedian/playwright Dan Lee, the father of her two children. She was devastated when the tale ended in divorce and single motherhood, which led to her sitting at the piano and writing "Story For The Ages." It was a year after the breakup and she felt she had enough distance from the split to be objective, but it was still a painful experience.
  
  "I wrote that first line: 'It was never meant to be like this.' I sat down at the piano and I played two chords and sang, 'It was never meant to be like this,' over and over again," she told Songfacts in a 2024 interview. "And I cried and cried and cried because saying that line to myself, I was admitting to myself that that was the crux of my sadness. Was it just that I had planned something different, and this is not what I planned, and this is not how the story was meant to go? I felt like that line had really got to something and got me deep in the heart. I cried for a long time and then slowly started to build the song."
• Higgins has no problem being vulnerable in her songs, but as an introvert it's hard for her to open up outside of her music. "I'm not very good at normal therapy," she admitted. "My therapist said to me that she thinks perhaps songwriting is my therapy. I'm not very open in sessions. I'm not good at talking about myself and my feelings in real time until I've sat down with an instrument and figured it out myself in my own time."
• Higgins wrote all of the songs on the album herself. Earlier in her career, she was pressured by her record label into co-writing, but she was never comfortable with the practice (her debut single "Scar" was inspired by her negative co-writing experiences), and prefers to write alone.
• The Second Act is Higgins' first full-length album in six years, following 2018's Solastalgia.