I’m James Alexander Higgins. I’m a professional singer and aspiring science fiction author based in Australia who has a big and curious brain that often gets me into trouble, but also enables me to do crazy and cool things like:

• Produce over a dozen albums for myself and various bands;

• collaborate with musical idols such as Jamiroquai and Earth, Wind & Fire;

• have the honour of singing at well over 500 weddings, bringing joy and beauty to the special day for thousands of people;

• write and self-publish science fiction novels;

• start a podcast and YouTube livestream which gathered over 10,000 subscribers;

• write and record dozens of educational safety songs for children of Guillin, China;

• direct and edit award-winning music videos;

• make a short animated film officially selected for Cannes Short Film Festival, in France;

• and today, amidst weekly performing and writing, I am raising two young sons (in split custody) in a bachelor cottage in the rainforest of Northern New South Wales.

This SubStack is place to gather all my creativity together into sections that you can curate for yourself. If you are interested in everything, your default subscription will include it all. But if you want to select to only hear about my music, or my books, or any combination of my various lanes, you may easily do so!

AUTHENTIC/DETAILED VERSION:

James Alexander Higgins made a tremendous decision in 2024. He decided that he would only ever write artistic biographies about himself in the third person if they were going to be read by Morgan Freeman.

And since that’s an expensive requisite, I find myself speaking as myself, with no more will to pretence with regards to my presentation to “the world”. I’ve been trying to curate how I am seen my whole life really, as a natural-born performer and precociously career-hungry young musician.

I’m not so young now.

I’ve had bands of brothers rise and craft their mythos, only to fizzle and disband. I’ve been in and out of married life, now divorced before 40, and struggling to figure out how to do the absolute best I can raising my two young sons into their adolescence and manhood. A great challenge lies before me, and I’ve waded through quite enough of my own delusion and projected hope that has not come to fruit to feel rather reluctant to create a legend about myself. Instead, I’ll just try to speak openly and plainly, and above all, truthfully (no fluff, no hype. Just me.).

Nomenclature

I am I. The name my parents gave me in 1986 is James Alexander Roff Higgins. It is a name rich with meaning, and history, and a name I am proud to bear, and for which I thank my parents and my ancestors past.

James is derived from Jacob, of Old Testament fame. The name has come to mean “supplanter” or “heel pincher”. I have wrestled with the meaning of this name since childhood. It has complex layers of manifest meaning in my life.

Alexander is most famed as the mighty golden-haired Macedonian conqueror of Asia, and as is fit for his incredible story of courage in leadership, and kingly heroism in battle (leading the charge over the battlements, as few kings do), the name means “defender of men”.

Roff is a Welsh heirloom, from my father’s father’s mother whose father was (presumably) a Welshman whose family name was Roff. [Tangent: my father’s DNA testing indicated enough South Asian genetics to confirm our suspicion from photographs that the daughter of Mister Roff (my Great Grandmother) had a mother who was half-Indian, thus one Indian Grandparent, so one Indian Great-Great-Grandparent for me. If I am not mistaken!] The name Roff comes from earlier Germanic Rudolf, which means “renowned wolf”.

Higgins comes from O’Higgins, which was originally in Irish Ó hUiginn, which means “descendant of Uiginn, which is the Anglicised Gaelic word for Viking).

All told, my names means: Heel-pinching supplanter, defender of men, renowned wolf of the Vikings. It’s an epic name, and I should never have chosen not to use it as an artist and in everything I do! Nevertheless, I chose in 2009 to reinvent myself as an artist known as James Fox Higgins. It’s a catchy name, certainly rolls off the tongue easier than my real name, and I built a brand around it over the years. But Fox was a name that was associated closely with the season of life that was my 14-year marriage, and now that is over and I find myself wanting to shed all masks, including branding masks. So I’m James Alexander Roff Higgins. James Alexander Higgins for short. James Alexander at gigs and on new recordings. James to you, my friend.

Background

I’ve had a bizarre and eclectic life, raised by a working-class Irish Catholic housewife-cum-multimedia-artist mother, and a soldiery-class Irish/English policeman-cum-crime-writer father, starting out in Adelaide’s Northern Hills until I was 9 years old, then moving up to the ‘rainbow region’ in Northern NSW where I survived my adolescence. I’ve moved away many time from the Tweed Valley, and Mt Warning under which I started the journey from boyhood to manhood (still going, I fear), with seasons living in the Gold Coast, Brisbane, Sydney, and Armidale, and a fair bit of travelling for gigs around the country.

Music

My music career began in 1994 when I was 8 and attended (with parental supervision and a box seat above the mosh pit) a grunge rock concert in Adelaide city of my cousin’s very popular local band Reckoning. I saw the connection cousin Seamus was able to make with the audience, singing passionately songs of his own writing, from his own heart, with hundreds of people singing along, dancing, moved.

I saw how his art connected, in composition and performance simultaneously, and it inspired me. I wrote him a letter saying I was going to be a music man like him. I soon after started trumpet lessons, which eventually spilled out into self-teaching guitar and keyboards so I could write and produce.

By 15 I was recording EPs and albums in my bedroom, some completely alone, playing every instrument, some with others who soon became my first band Zenith.

Zenith turned into Kajacosmic in the university years, which eventually rebranded as Nude Continuum when we released our first commercial album Nightclub of the Nudist in 2009. With a lineup change after a European Tour which was half victory, half disaster, we rebranded again as Soul Continuum, at which time. Itook centre front stage as the lead singer for the first time in my career. We released an album and played some great shows around Queensland, then disbanded when I moved to Sydney in 2012, and I have since focussed on recording music as a solo artist under the monicker James Fox Higgins (4 albums released under that name) and producing others, rather than being in a band.

My career has been full of artistic and creative success, as well as rife with failure, disaster, disappointment, seasons of disinterest, and… well I feel the best is yet to come, as my music and singing voice keep improving over time.

If you’d like to dive deeper into my musical back catalog and stories from my adventures and misadventures on the road, please hop over to the Music Career Timeline and Catalog which I will regularly update and add links to various music stories as posts, as well as to a post for each album release and for each song (bear with me as I build this over time, there are over 75 commercially released songs that I have written, and many more unreleased that I will share with paying subscribers right here!

Books

With a professional writer father to encourage me, and a long family history of storytelling, poetry, and music, all the way back to my original Irish O’Huigin ancestors who were famed bardic poets and historians, there was no chance that I wasn’t going to write a book at some point. Had so many ideas over the years and was already writing shorts stories, plays, films, and of course many poems and songs throughout school. But it took me until 2015 to get excited about a story idea that could be developed to be bigger and bigger. The idea came to me driving from Queensland to Sydney and listening to a Ray Kurzweil interview on transhumanism. It sparked my imagination about AI, human-machine convergence, and even the nature of the self and the mind. I had always enjoyed science fiction films, shows, and novels, but hadn’t dug deep into the canon of essential sci fi reading, nor was I versed in any coherent philosophy (just the hodge-podge of moralisms I had absorbed from my environment without real thought). But this kernel of a story idea got me questioning everything about what it means to be human, and the story kept growing, out of my control, haunting my day dreams, and even my night dreams.

So in 2016 I started writing the book at the same time as beginning ravenously consuming science fiction novels by greats like Asimov, Herbert, Heinlein, CS Lewis, Jules Verne, HP Lovecraft, Orson Scott Card, Neal Stephenson, and many more, using audiobooks at 1.5x speed as the main tool to enable me to consume a book or two a week (mostly as I was driving around the land to gigs). I became an addicted reader, and passionately curious about all the subjects that branch off from the science fiction I was reading. This led me to philosophy, which taught me of its five pillars: metaphysics, epistemology, politics, ethics, and aesthetics. I listened to modern philosophers on YouTube, and read ancient philosophers, to help me build and understand this story that was haunting me so.

All that fuel in and the fire of inspiration had the first draft full written in 6 months, then submitted to a professional and experienced editor (a friend of my father’s doing a favour for this upstart son-of-a-writer) who kindly and honestly tore it to shreds and helped me start half of the book (the Marcus Hamlin half) from scratch and make it vastly better.

In 2017 I released the first edition of The Ghost of Emily, Book 1 of the Ghosts of Men Trilogy to Amazon and started recording the first audiobook.

The book series has kept growing since then, in my mind if not in prose over some quiet seasons, and Book 2 The Ghost of Delacroix has been out since 2019. Book 3 The Ghost of Melchizedek is still underway, and all three books are rolling out here on the website in fresh, polished and refined 2024 editions, first as text posts, then as Audiobooks (chapter 1 already published!), and eventually as new paperback and hardcover editions with brand new cover design. Be sure to subscribe to The Ghosts of Men Trilogy section of this site to stay in the loop as chapters and books are released!

Filmmaking

My uncle had this crazy massive shoulder-mounted VHS camera back in the early 90s that my Dad used to borrow to make amateur films around the homestead. I got involved with some, but it was always cool to have a Dad who just did creative stuff for fun, and it gave me the sense that none of it was beyond my ability, and I could be a film maker with enough learning and practise.

I started directing and editing music videos for my original songs in High School, with a very photogenic and expressive performer of a songwriting partner who was the on-camera artist, while I got to direct and edit.

The film-making obsession and personal study of the craft of film writing and production led me to produce an award music video for the song Sleeping With Yourself, which the Best Music Video Award sponsored by Warner Bros Roadshow Entertainment (scored some excellent equipment for my video lab too!).

In my final year of university, instead of focussing on music as I was enrolled to, I was hanging out with the film making department, schmoozing with their tech manager so I could borrow their gear, and enlisting a team of student film makers to help me turn my short film script Strung! into a complete 12-minute movie. I obsessed and traded in sleep for most of that year, but we made it! A bizarre and psychedelic little comedy about two arm-chair philosopher on a random drug cocktail, it was completed but never screened or released. It will be shared here eventually, for paid subscribers to enjoy.

In 2021 my family production crew Kitsune House produced three short animated films aimed at children and parents within the world of Steiner Education, and of course beyond that circle too, offering beautiful and simple storytelling with an visual style inspired by the indications of Rudolf Steiner’s unique research into spiritual pedagogy and childhood learning. The first of these films, Winter Warmth, was Officially Selected for the Cannes Short Film Festival in France.

General Interests

I have a vast range of lesser interests, and (in typical ADHD fashion) I am prone to deep-diving into all kinds of strange and esoteric topics for my own hungry learning and imagination to be fuelled! It makes for great general and unique knowledge that I can weave into my fiction, and I’ve particularly enjoyed doing this in the Ghosts of Men Trilogy; laying little breadcrumbs or sometimes referencing in detail strange events and oddities of history.

Areas of interest and curiosity: Jesus Christ, Fatherhood, Relationships, Neurodivergence, ADHD, ADHD parenting, Self-Knowledge, Re-emergence, History, Genealogy, Antiquities, Historical Revisionism & Alternative Perspectives, Language, Etymology, Movies, Albums, Fitness & Weightlifting, Archery & Swordsmanship, Marksmanship, Art, Classical Music, Classical Architecture, Philosophy, Art of War, Weird Outcasts & Outsiders, Christianity, Church History, Faith & Spiritual Wellbeing, Eastern Religions & Philosophy, Japanese traditional culture and art, Celtic (Irish/Scottish) traditional culture and art, and all kinds of other trifles…

More will be added and linked as I think of and write posts about them!

Past Interests

And of course, there were things I used to talk about, explore, sometimes promote, or even espouse belief in. I grow and change, continually, and though I zig and occasionally zag, and seldom walk a straight an narrow path of learning growth, it is growth in a healthful and clear-sighted direction (I’m on my way). These are things are will not be tagged, because I won’t be discussing them anymore, but I acknowledge that I did in the past, and it might have been how you connected with me. Sorry if all your favourite topics are not my thing anymore, but I’m sure if you open your mind and explore, especially my fiction, you will find hints and references to the things I learned about these topics and perspectives. It’s not to say I despise these topics, I have just identified that the costs of dwelling in these realms of thought and study outweigh the benefits for me and my loved ones. Keep digging, and excuse me for opting out of such discussion outside of my fiction.

Areas of disinterest and incuriousness: Geopolitics, Red v Blue Team Election Cycles, Current Affairs, Finance News, Crypto Markets, Religious Flamewars, Fringe Politics, New World Order, Conspiracy Theories (except historical ones, which I am still very interested in!), Life Coaching/Mentoring, Advice-giving for Christian men.

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