Songfacts®:

• Around the time of her 18th birthday, Australian singer-songwriter Missy Higgins landed her first record deal. While most artists would probably head straight to the recording studio, Higgins left the continent to go backpacking around Europe. That decision inadvertently inspired her heartache ballad "Ten Days."
  
  "I'd just broken up with my boyfriend - we'd decided that we couldn't be together because I was going to be away too much," she told BBC News in 2005. "I'd been away for ten days and I was just really in agony because I was really missing him. I regretted leaving him so it's basically a song about missing someone and regretting certain things that you've done.
  
  I actually recorded the song as soon as I wrote it and sent it to him because it was his birthday. We ended up getting back together - you can't write a song about that and not get back together!"
• Higgins wasn't done traveling after she came home from Europe. In 2003, she embarked on an Australian tour as a supporting act for the Aussie rock bands The Waifs and george, and began writing songs for her debut album, The Sound Of White, on the road.
• Higgins' bad co-writing experiences influenced her debut single, "Scar," but this wasn't one of them. She wrote "Ten Days" with Jay Clifford, the frontman of the North Carolina-based indie-rock band Jump, Little Children. Clifford's small suggestion ended up making a huge impact on the song.
  
  "I remember I wrote the verse and the chorus for that song, and I brought it to him. He basically said, 'Why don't you swap the chorus for some of the verses, and make the verses the chorus?' It was such a small thing, and that was kind of all he did, but it's actually massive. It kind of made the song, and it made the well-loved chorus it is today, and he was right," she recalled in a 2024 Songfacts interview.
  
  "Sometimes it takes an objective opinion to go, 'I reckon it's almost there. You just need to switch these two things around.' That was really cool and they're my favorite kind of co-writes because that song is ultimately true to who I am and my vision, but the arrangement has been helped and sculpted by someone with the ability to step back and has a really good ear for a pop song."
• This was the second single released from Higgins' debut album. It peaked at #12 on Australia's ARIA Singles Chart.
• The album (along with her first, self-titled EP) was produced by John Porter, who previously worked with The Smiths, Ryan Adams, and Elvis Costello.