Her angelic voice was chiming throughout Christchurch Cathedral, captivating an intimate crowd.

“That was the best show on the tour,” Mitchell gushes of her June ­performance.

“It was the most magic cathedral – it was incredible – and there were people on the sides of the stage as well as the middle – it felt really epic.

“There was a lunar eclipse too, so it was a beautiful, special night where everything came together.”

Mitchell will return to the road in October, including a show at the University of Newcastle.

It will kickstart a busy touring schedule, which will include Falls Festival, a brief two-week sojourn in India, and a return to her homeland of England.

The singer will particularly relish the opportunity to perform the new ­material on her ambitious second album Bless This Mess.

“It’s very refreshing,” Mitchell says. “It’s like walking the same way to work every day, and then you take a random little turn–it’s like ‘Oh gosh, the world is so different.’

“[Performing new songs is] ­confronting though – this is real stuff for me. It’s not done for the sake of it. It’s come through me from my emotions and the universe – it’s really big stuff.”

Mitchell isn’t exaggerating. Bless This Mess is the 22-year-old’s rumination of the meaning of life and our place in the universe.

“There are big questions in this album of what we’re doing here and where I’m meant to be that is closest to my purpose,” Mitchell says. "What does it mean to be creative and who’s in charge of that.

“Am I in charge of that? Is the universe in charge of that?”

Mitchell’s entry point into the existential thoughts in her new album was the old-fashioned term “bless this mess”, which was often seen cross-stitched and hanging on the walls of our grandparents’ generation.

Lyrically, the songwriter grapples with the chaos of everyday life and places her own existence in the context of space and time.

The record is a deeper exploration of Mitchell’s dreamy, whimsical take on folk-pop and her fragile coo is sweeter than ever.

With some studio assistance from producer and Evermore drummer Dann Hume, Bless This Mess will be welcomed with the same warmth as Mitchell’s 2009 debut Wonder.

“An old generic saying like ‘bless this mess’ still holds so much truth,” Mitchell says. “Isn’t it just crazy how messy, and how dark and how light every day is? Each person is like this little boat on the bobbing sea - sometimes you’re getting tossed around and other times it’s so calm.

“That’s just the nature of it - life is a cycle, and there are cycles within the cycle. There are peaks and troughs and milestones. “When you do hit a real dark spot, it’s so truthful – I don’t think there’s anything more truthful than feeling dark because it brings up the big questions - am I doing the right thing?  Is this right for me?

“I guess this album honours that - it honours the mess that our life is and how it is so powerful when we embrace that.”

Given the album’s name, it will come as no surprise that Mitchell is comfortable with a little clutter.

But the singer makes no apologies for hanging on to life’s mementoes.

“I think [“bless this mess”] has surfaced in my psyche over the last few years and I’m coming to terms with how I naturally am,” Mitchell explains. “I am a messy person – being ordered has never sat well with me, to put it diplomatically.

“I’ve been noticing that that’s how I live and I can be really guilty and angry at myself, or I can really look at the benefits of what it is to be a messy person. I have so much cool stuff in my room and all I’ve got to do is just dig around and I’ll find some cool stuff. It’s like hunting for treasure.”

This maturity and self-realisation left an indelible mark on the music that Mitchell wrote for Bless This Mess.

The songwriter has come a long way since appearing as a fresh-faced 16-year-old on Australian Idol, where she was a top 10 contestant alongside Damien Leith, Jessica Mauboy, Bobby Flynn and Dean Geyer.

Mitchell’s sophomore record is the work of an enlightened artist and it’s creation culminated in its stunning title track.

“Bless This Mess, that whole concept - that term – has stuck with me for the last couple of years and I really knew that that was going to be the name of my album, before I had ­written most of it,” Mitchell explains. “It’s a little mantra that I found endlessly empowering and endlessly true.

“Something weird that happened, was when I sat down at the very end of the album cycle and wrote the [title track]. I started with this idea of making an album called Bless This Mess and the incubation period of all the ideas and similar feelings completely ­manifested into a song.”

One of the musical highlights of Bless This Mess is The Raven and the Mushroom Man, a fable that emerged from Mitchell’s imagination after reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 classic The Little Prince.

In Mitchell’s tale, the Mushroom Man “has a fat head and sweats” and symbolises the rat-race of society and our lust for financial success.

A raven with a broken wing lands on his planet and gives the Mushroom Man the opportunity to demonstrate compassion and generosity.

If this story appeared in the work of a different artist, you might assume they had conjured a mushroom of a different variety, but in Mitchell’s musical landscape it makes perfect sense.

“The raven in my music is always a sign of hope, because it’s my version of a dove,” Mitchell explains. “Basically hope is planted in this ­little Mushroom Man. It’s a fantastical metaphor for ­society and how we need to get away from this toxic idea that we all have to be rich – and consumerism. That’s my little rant against that.”

Lisa Mitchell performs at the Bar on the Hill at the University of Newcastle on Thursday, October 18 with support from Alpine and Danco (Dann Hume).

Bless This Mess is released on October 12.

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