This Beautiful Mess

The title track to Lisa Mitchell's second album, Bless This Mess, is 2012's great over-the-top, overjoyed, over-exuberant pop-song; a celebratory explosion that plays like Since U Been Gone crossed with that Vanessa Carlton song where she played piano on the beach while horses frolicked, by way of, like, Japandroids' throttling-down-a-hill-on-a-bike-with-no-brakes garage-rock righteousness, with that same feeling of being at a Flaming Lips liveshow when the balloons and streamers fall from the ceiling and your heart swells and the Earth is at one. It's the musical equivalent of cartwheels and catherine wheels, of day-seizing and boy-kissing and leaping off piers into water; like how Fang Island call their jams the sound of “everyone high-fiving everyone” or that Stuart Murdoch story in the Lazy Line Painter Jane liner-notes where the song's heroine runs through the streets pretending she's in a music video. I'm listening to it right now, and if you were next to me, I'd probably give you a hug.

Mitchell – the 22-year-old starlet who, these days, calls Melbourne home – describes it as “such a pro-life song”, and she's obviously not talking about conservative Christian incursions or repealing reproductive rights. Tumblr memeage may've made the phrase 'fuck yeah' banal to the point of meaninglessness, but the song – and much of the LP named after it – has an undoubted fuck-yeah quality to it. “It's about embracing the chaos,” Mitchell beams. “That joyous feeling is something that I can hear happens a lot, in a lot of the songs.”

That joy literally glows off Mitchell – her sparkling smile matches her shiny gold sneakers. If it weren't obvious from the near-ridiculous giddiness of Bless This Mess – of the song being taken as totemic title for the album; her follow-up to 2009's platinum-selling Wonder – there's falling in love and being in love, and being in a relationship behind all this, this... happiness. Mitchell, happy to be on record as happy in her union with Jordan Wilson, leader of Sydney-based pop outfit Georgia Fair.

“There's a massive amount of joy when you find that one person that you actually think that you could spend the rest of your life with,” Mitchell says. “There's such joy in that. It's so joyous yet it's so very confronting. You've gotta be so real about everything, and constantly real with them. So I feel like I've gotten good at getting to the truth really quickly. It's been a pretty cool time – joy and truth... [There's] been a really positive direction in my life the last few years, and that's totally reflected in songs like Bless This Mess.

“I wasn't really thinking about any of this when I was making it,” she continues. “It's much more intuitive than that. It's only now, when I listen to the album, that I'm able to think, 'Oh, I've been quite happy!' You can hear it in a song like Spiritus, which is really just 'Eff yes! Life! Oh my gosh! This is good! I see it! I see the light! I figured a word like that, spiritus, it calls for such a life force song. It's another song just about joy. And the recording of that was obviously just inspired by that joy, and trying to reflect that in the sounds of the song, the chord changes, and the production.”

This outward expression of happiness comes, Mitchell says, from introspection; from “a lot of questioning”, of self-examination following ascendant rise from 16-year-old Australian Idol starlet to ARIA-nominated, platinum-selling success; the songwriter feeling a sense of unease about how swiftly her life dreams were realised; and then, what was to follow them. “I had to ask myself, constantly, 'Is what I'm doing right? Does this feel right?'” Mitchell says, about following up her first LP's 'success'. “That's such an epic, big stereotype that's imprinted in people's brains – success. And what does 'success' mean, usually? Making lots of money. So when people talk about success, I'm always just... 'Do I have to want to make lots of money? Can't I just sing my songs?' I had to learn that I couldn't let other people's ideas of success cloud my own feelings of what I wanted to do.”

There's a thoughtfulness to everything Mitchell says that underlines this, and a wistfulness, too, and a desire to avoid the usual trappings of interviewdom, to circumvent soundbites and discuss life and humanity and the world – in both its fucked and fuck-yeah! forms – at length rather than push the promotional line; our conversation a sprawling philosophical plunge into topics that have no place in this story – like the education system's patriarchal hierarchies; like the biological urge for reproduction and its exploitation by advertising (and, in turn, how basic human desire is the engine that drives the hyper-capitalist system); like ephemeral love and tiny instances of fate and friendship and death; being alive on a dying planet.

Amidst all this, Mitchell talks about what it's been like to effectively grow up in public; how she's felt going from girl to woman amidst the machinery of the music industry, and how it's been becoming a woman – an independent woman – and asserting her adulthood, her will, upon those who condescend it. “Three years ago, I really felt it,” Mitchell says of the making – and releasing – of Wonder. “I was a young girl in the eyes of others. There were all these old guys who were just making decisions for me. And the whole time I felt like this intense angst. I'd sit there quietly, and then I'd just have to say, 'Wait! No, no, no, no, no, no! Um, hi! This is about me! Like, why are you making that decision?' But these men just so naturally take on that role, that paternal role.”

Mitchell had to learn to ruffle feathers; to, as Johanna Fateman of Le Tigre so eloquently put it in their tour documentary Who Took The Bomp?, had to overthrow that socially prescribed role of the woman having to play placater, to make sure everyone else is comfortable. “There's that persistent, awful thing in society where any woman who doesn't do what you want is a bitch,” Mitchell sighs. “She's just a bitch! Like, people are allowed to really hate her, when she just didn't do what you wanted her to do. Whereas, obviously, if men don't do what you want, there's more respect there.”

Now, Mitchell considers, all that stuff bounces off her. Lemons are lemonade; stereotypes are remade; marrow is sucked out of life; her happiness is infectious; her joy is catching; possibilities are endless; this mess is blessed. “I've been around the block, once,” Mitchell forwards, with both an easy smile and a sense of underlying forcefulness. “But, then again, this is the music industry, so there's no rules and there's no blocks. I think maybe that's a big thing. To me, that becomes this really empowering realisation – 'if there's no rules, I can do anything I want'. Being a bit older, knowing myself a bit more, being more confident in myself, I feel like I'm able to back up all my arguments, all my ideas. I feel like I can do whatever I want.”