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What’s the most memorable, wrong explanation that you’ve heard for the meaning behind one of your songs?

Some people thought that the line “we’ll bleed together” in my song The Special Two was about two women syncing periods. I always thought that was a quite funny and very, very literal metaphor. And probably the first time somebody had written a song about syncing periods.

What’s the best piece of advice you have ever received?

My dad once said to me, “You’ve done enough, you don’t have to keep proving yourself.” I was in my 30s, I had kids, and I was trying really hard to keep my career going. I felt like if I didn’t come up with any more music, I wasn’t going to be able to respect myself any more. I hadn’t proved myself worthy yet, whatever the hell that means. And dad said, “You’ve done enough.”

That made me really think about who it was that I was trying to prove something to – at what point I would be able to stop pushing so hard. It’s OK to just live and release what you release. You’re not going to be a failure if you stop releasing music.

What’s been your most cringeworthy run-in with a celebrity?

My friend dragged me backstage once to meet Patty Griffin. I had specifically said to my friend that I really didn’t want to meet her, because I don’t like meeting my idols. But she just ambushed me at the end and said, “Come back. She’s expecting to meet you!” So she dragged me backstage and I just stood there. I was completely mute. I think I just mumbled something like, “Nice to meet you.” I couldn’t even look her in the eyes. Patty was lovely. She probably thought, “What is this woman doing?” I swear I was the biggest fan ever.

Your song Where I Stood was used in a bunch of big US TV shows in the 2000s. What does having your song in a Grey’s Anatomy episode do to your career?

That was back in the day when it was very, very exciting to get your song on an American TV show. There were all these artists that broke out that way – it was either from Grey’s Anatomy or an Apple commercial. So my song got on Grey’s Anatomy, but just as that was starting to become a little bit passé. [laugh] No one was that excited about it any more. It definitely did something – that song went gold in America, so it was very successful and I toured that album for like two and a half years.

What are you secretly really good at?

I’ve become very good at waking up very late and getting my kids fed, dressed and to school within about 45 minutes. Every morning, I’m really not sure how we manage it. Every morning, I say, “I have got to wake us all up earlier.” Every morning, I get them there by nine o’clock.

What is the strangest thing you have done for love?

When I was in my early 20s, I sent my boyfriend at the time my song Ten Days. I wrote it for him, recorded it on CD and sent it because I was in the US and it was his birthday. But I also put an electric razor in there. When I think about that, I think it’s just the most odd decision to put an electric razor in with a love song. I think a love song was probably enough. But he had a beard and I wanted him to get rid of it. It’s completely contrasting levels of sentimentality.

If you had a sandwich named after you, what would be in it?

I’m pescatarian, but I love a vegan Reuben. I want the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and the big rolls of fake meat. I’m often trying to find the best vegan Reuben in Melbourne. So I’d be that, with a cute little radicchio side salad.

What’s been your most memorable interaction with a fan?

When I was living in Broome, I frequented this cafe where one of the waitresses came up to me and said, “Oh my God. I’m such a big fan.” We got chatting and it turned out we knew all these people in common, and we were in the same friendship group in Broome. And I wouldn’t usually start hanging out with someone who just told me they’re a massive fan, but there was just something about her. Maybe it was because we were in Broome, and that’s just kind of what you do. Anyway, we became great friends and we just went to the Maldives together.

What book, album or film do you find yourself returning to, and why?

I find myself returning a lot to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I tend to give that book to a lot of people too. It was given to me by a journalist in San Francisco. I was touring America at the time, and he said to me, this book will change your life. I didn’t believe him but I didn’t have anything else to read, so I read it. And it did change my life. It completely changed the way that I thought about western culture and modern society, the agricultural revolution and the Bible. It’s one of those books that just blows open everything you thought you knew.

What’s been your biggest fashion crime to date?

I wear slippers to drop my kids off – I’m committing my biggest crime every school day.

• Missy Higgins is performing at Wanderer festival at Pambula Beach, New South Wales, 4-5 October

Not a flounce, ruffle or rose clenched between teeth is in sight when Danielle de Niese sashays onstage as Carmen – dressed in a boiler suit.

The Australian-born lyric soprano’s Carmen will not be the Gypsy seductress audiences have come to expect. In Opera Australia’s new production, set in present-day Seville, she is a grounded woman ending another long shift in a cigarette factory. She loosens the fastenings around the neck of her uniform – a glimpse of glistening shoulder, an arch of the back and throat. To her female co-workers, she is hot, exhausted and stiff. To the lads waiting and watching, she is something else.

“Through the male gaze, something functional can appear alluring,” de Niese says. “To the males watching that moment becomes charged.”

De Niese, speaking to the Guardian in June shortly after arriving in the country to begin rehearsals for her debut performance in the Bizet opera, says her iteration of Carmen has not emerged out of a desire to “just do something different for the sake of it”.

“I just want every word, every gesture, to feel believable. That’s the only thing that matters.”

For years, de Niese’s fans had nudged her toward Carmen – a natural fit, they assumed, for a sultry-looking soprano known as much for her theatrical flair as her vocal precision. But until now she had resisted the obvious casting.

“It wasn’t about the aria’s reputation,” she says of the instantly recognisable Habanera, Carmen’s opening solo. “It was the story in the lyrics that really caught me. I realised I’d never actually listened to them before – not really.”

What drew her in was the way Carmen’s fate is foretold in her first few lines: Love is a rebellious bird / That no one can tame. “We hear the Habanera and think, ‘Oh here she comes, the femme fatale.’ But the text is full of foreboding. It’s a warning. That’s what I wanted to tell – not just the song, but the story.”

In this new take on Carmen, directed by Melbourne Theatre Company’s Anne-Louise Sarks, cliches are both acknowledged and upended. In one sequence, the ensemble parades through a surreal Carmen-themed carnival, donning the very stereotypes the opera has long perpetuated – mantillas, castanets, off-the-shoulder peasant blouses.

But the Carmen in this production is emotionally complex – proud, spirited and caught in a love that corrodes as much as it consumes.

“I’m really interested in the kind of love that can unravel you,” de Niese says. “The kind that starts as passion and turns into something toxic – and you don’t see it happening until you’ve lost yourself.”

This is the challenge de Niese has set herself: not to reinvent Carmen, but to restore her complexity.

“I don’t want her to be a cool enigma,” she says. “I want her to feel like someone you know. Someone whose choices you understand, even if you don’t agree with them.”

She points to the recent testimony of singer Cassie Ventura in her case against her ex-boyfriend Sean “Diddy” Combs as a contemporary example of “those emotional entanglements, that blurring of control and desire. That’s very real. And very now.”

To an outsider looking in, de Niese’s own life appears less than real, more like a fairytale. Born in Melbourne to Sri Lankan parents, her first taste of fame came early, becoming Young Talent Time Discovery Quest’s youngest ever winner at the age of nine in 1988.

The family moved to Los Angeles, and at the age of 16, de Niese won an Emmy for her role as a regular guest host of the TV program LA Kids. By then, the child prodigy had already made her operatic debut with the Los Angeles Opera. At 19 she was singing Barbarina in The Marriage of Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera.

Seven years later, she wowed audiences as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare at the prestigious Glyndebourne festival. Marriage to Gus Christie, the third generation of Christies to own and operate Glyndebourne, followed.

Her life as lady of the manor at the historic English estate is “idyllic,” she admits, but it took a bit of work initially to be accepted by elitists as something more than an American interloper. She was interrogated about her knowledge of cricket – amusing she concedes, given her Australian and Sri Lankan backgrounds – and pilloried when the last of Glyndebourne’s famous dynasty of pugs died and she replaced them with bulldogs and Portuguese waterdogs.

Today, she graciously wears the New York Times title of “opera’s coolest soprano”, and in 2023 Tatler named her as one of Britain’s 25 best dressed.

“People see the highlights and think it was all silver platter,” she says. But her career, she insists, has not been filled with shortcuts: “I’ve been the tortoise, not the hare. I’ve taken risks, yes, but every step, slow. Every choice, deliberate.”

That discipline has preserved her voice – and allowed it to evolve. “Ten years ago, I couldn’t have sung Carmen,” she says. “Now it sits perfectly. My voice has broadened, darkened. It feels like it’s grown into its home.”

As Carmen, she intends to do just that. Not an archetype, not a cautionary tale – but a woman, vivid and vulnerable, stepping out from the smoke, fully alive.

“Opera is a high-wire act,” she says. “Every choice matters. But the most important one is this: tell the story like it’s happening for the first time. Make it real.”

British singer Robbie Williams has joined the list of musical performances at Sunday’s Club World Cup final in New Jersey, and will perform before the game gets underway, FIFA announced on Saturday.

Chelsea will take on European champions Paris-Saint Germain at MetLife Stadium in the Club World Cup’s showpiece final, which will also include a half-time show and introductions by boxing announcer Michael Buffer.

Williams — a FIFA music ambassador — will perform their official anthem “Desire” alongside Italian pop star Laura Pausini.

FIFA announced the half-time show before the tournament in the United States began — American rapper Doja Cat, Colombian singer J Balvin and Nigerian singer Tems will perform at the break.

Adding to the novelty of the final, a flyover will take place as well a performance of the American national anthem before kick-off.

FIFA president Gianni Infantino confirmed that U.S. President Donald Trump will attend the final speaking at Trump Tower in Manhattan on Saturday.

“President Trump will be at the final,” Infantino said. “He loves soccer. In his first term as president there was a soccer goal in the White House garden. President Trump is the president of the U.S., one of the host countries for the World Cup, and he embraced immediately the Club World Cup as well.

“Events like these are huge events. You can’t stage tournaments like this without his support.”