Songfacts®:

• Missy Higgins' aptly titled sixth album, The Second Act, details the reconstruction of the Aussie singer-songwriter's life after the painful breakdown of her marriage, which left her as a single mother. The raw single "You Should Run" is an attempt to move on with her love life, but she warns her potential suitor that her emotional baggage may be too hard to handle. In a 2024 Songfacts interview, Higgins admitted the track "comes from a really ugly place."
  
  "It came from a place of detesting myself and feeling so much shame, and basically saying to this person that my life is so hard and unattractive right now, you should really do yourself a favor and find someone who has a much simpler life and is not so screwed up emotionally," she said. "At the heart of it, it's ultimately a cry for help, but it's also wanting this person to prove that they're strong enough to love me and stand by me through the really hard stuff."
• Higgins announced her separation from her comedian and playwright husband Dan Lee in 2022 after six years of marriage. They have two children, son Samuel and daughter Luna.
• Higgins regards The Second Act as a kind of sequel to her 2004 debut album, The Sound Of White, which introduced her confessional songwriting style with popular singles like "Scar" and "Ten Days." Even though they were released 20 years apart at vastly different points in the singer's life, both albums seek answers to the same questions. "They're both looking forward nervously and wondering what comes next," she noted in a press release. "They're both asking questions like 'who am I?' and 'who do I want to be?'"
• Higgins didn't intentionally plan the album to be a sequel, but she realized her songwriting was reminiscent of the introspective and unselfconscious way she wrote as a teenager before the pressure of fame and hits weighed on her.
  
  "I was so young with my first album, and I didn't know if anyone would listen to my songs," she told Songfacts. "It was my first experience of pouring my heart out and I hadn't had any experiences to show that maybe I should protect myself a bit more. By putting yourself out there, you're opening yourself up to scrutiny and judgment. All of that was not in my consciousness. It was this very free-flowing process writing those songs and a lot of them I wrote as a teenager in my bedroom just working through my teenage angst."
  
  By the time she wrote The Second Act two decades later, she was unselfconscious for very different reasons. Having already made her mark as an artist, she didn't feel the need to prove herself anymore and knew she had a fanbase to support her.
  
  "I feel very lucky in that way and that afforded me a lot of freedom to let go and follow my intuition completely and not think about or worry about the final product or if it would sell or not," she continued. "Also, a part of me doesn't really give a s--t anymore what people think. When you're going through something so full on, so tough emotionally, that's the last thing on your mind. Because music is so therapeutic and I was going through something so tough, my #1 priority was to stop the pain, and wanting people to like the songs came later."
• The music video, directed by Claudia Sangiorgi Dalimore (Thelma Plum, Mojo Juju), opens with Higgins sitting alone on the floor in a house as she pours her heart out about her troubles. It continues to follow her throughout the day as she tries to do normal tasks like taking care of her kids, doing the laundry, or playing the piano, but all of her efforts are marked by loneliness. The clip ends with her lying alone in her bed.