The Special Two

Album: The Sound Of White (2004)
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Songfacts®:

  • On her debut album, The Sound Of White, Australian singer-songwriter Missy Higgins sings vulnerable pop tunes about being hurt in personal and professional relationships. With "The Special Two," however, she has to come to terms with the fact that she inflicted pain on someone she loves and tries to make amends.

    "Basically I made a big mistake," she admitted in a 2004 interview with The Age. "I fell into a lump of depression, locking myself out the back in the bungalow. After a couple of days I came up with the song. I played it to that person and it was therapeutic. It was a good sorry letter."

    She later revealed the person she hurt was her older sister, Nicola. They both liked the same boy, and Higgins broke the girl code by going out with him.
  • Nicola, who angrily gave Higgins a piece of her mind after the betrayal, first heard the remorseful song at one of her sister's concerts. "During the show she said that she'd just written a song and it was about someone in the audience, then she played 'The Special Two' - an apology to me. I just stood there crying," she told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2018.
  • Nicola, who is eight years older than Higgins, has always been supportive of her sister's music career, long before it even started.

    "She was this little thing I could play with," Nicola explained. "I'd dress her up in full '80s clothes and shove a little microphone in her hand. We had one of those old VHS cameras and we'd make a stage and get her singing to Abba. She loved it. She loved attention."

    When a teenaged Higgins wrote the song "All For Believing" for a school music assignment, Nicola entered the recording into the Australian radio station Triple J's Unearthed competition on Higgins' behalf. The song won and was featured on the station's playlists, which led to Higgins landing a record deal before she was even out of high school.
  • This was first introduced on Higgins' self-titled debut EP in 2003. She re-recorded it for her first full-length album, and it was released as the third single, following "Scar" and "Ten Days." It peaked at #2 on the ARIA Singles Chart.
  • This was nominated for Single Of The Year and Highest-Selling Single at the 2005 ARIA Music Awards (the Australian equivalent to the Grammy Awards). It lost the respective trophies to Ben Lee's "Catch My Disease" and Anthony Callea's Anthony Callea. Higgins, however, didn't walk away empty handed. She took the prizes for Album Of The Year, Best Pop Release, Highest-Selling Album, Breakthrough Artist - Album, and Best Female Artist.

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