While attending school Missy Higgins won the Triple J radio Unearthed demo competition with her song ‘All For Believing’ and record companies flooded her with offers, but the Melbourne singer-songwriter had other plans. “I’d been planning to go backpacking in Europe and had been saving up. When I started to get record companies interested I was curious to see how they would react when I said I wanted to go overseas for a year,” she tells the New Zealand Herald. “Some panicked, but the companies I ended up signing with [Eleven, through Virgin] thought it would be good for me to develop as an artist. So I lived in London for a bit with my brother then we went around France, Italy, Switzerland and Spain. We went to a lot of art galleries, but I brought my guitar so there were a lot of singalongs in hostels. I left the guitar on a train in Spain so really only had the one finished song when I came back.” And now with Virgin, thanks to the smash success of her debut album ‘The Sound of White’ in Australia, Higgins will be touring America next year hoping to expand her fanbase.

Though Missy Higgins celebrated her 21st birthday and her first No. 1 single ‘Scar’, she still lives in the backyard bungalow of her parents’ Melbourne home. Higgins tells The Herald Sun her family has kept her down to earth amid her recent success. “My dad has trained me not to get too excited about things,” she said.