Singer-songwriter Lisa Mitchell is happy to be back on the road performing for fans.
The life of a recording artist is one of extremes. When they're not amping it up in front of a crowd and playing a different town every night, they are often holed up on their own writing songs and recording them.
Singer-songwriter Lisa Mitchell says that after spending more than a year shut away working on her second album, the recently released Bless This Mess, she is desperate to get out on the road.
"I'm super excited," she laughs. "You've been working on something so long you get to the stage - I've lost all self-consciousness about my music, I'm just so keen on sharing it with people and going around Australia and connecting with people.
"It's so extreme the different sides of the record cycle. I'm absolutely ravenous to get out there again."
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The 22-year-old Mitchell, who came to fame as a teenage contestant on the 2006 season of Australian Idol, says writing songs for Bless This Mess was a challenge.
"Because I already had one album out I felt a bit of pressure making the second," she says. "I felt subconsciously blocked, because my relationship with songwriting had to change so much.
"I went from being a schoolkid who wrote songs in her bedroom to being a musician where most of the songs are going to end up on a record - that changes so much.
"Once I got that sorted the gates opened."
Mitchell decided on "Bless this mess" as the album's name before she even began working on it.
"Bless this mess is an old fuddy-duddy saying, the sort of thing you see in an op shop cross-stitched into a cushion," she says.
"I love it because everyone knows it and yet we kind of forget about it and it holds so much truth - this idea that life is so messy and we can't control it, yet if we embrace that and try to see the beauty in imperfection it's so empowering and so honest.
"The actual song Bless This Mess I wrote in the last few months of recording. The song is about feeling lost but trying to see the beauty in infinity, and the beauty of not knowing why we're here and not knowing, well, not knowing a lot of things. I guess it's really about embracing the unknown.
"The production is really victorious - everyone's smashing the drums as hard as they can or thrashing their guitars with as much meaning as they can.
"That comes from the meaning of the song, which is about trying to embrace these big questions that you can't really answer.
"A big theme of the album is about awakening to what life is and deciding why we do things.
"That's pretty much Bless This Mess in a nutshell."