Miranda Easten opens up about her complicated road to success. Photo / Ingmar Wein
With her country music finding growing audiences here and overseas, Miranda Easten tells Penny Lewis about her complicated road to success, her father’s imprisonment, and how she faces her fears.
Stage fright is something many of us suffer from, but for country singer-songwriter Miranda Easten, it’s a trip to the mall that fills her with dread.
The 35-year-old Cantabrian suffers from agoraphobia, a debilitating condition where sufferers experience a fear of being in situations where it might be difficult to escape.
“I don’t go into supermarkets. And if I do go into a shop, it’s because it’s on the ground floor and has windows. I can just get straight back out if I need to.”
Any excursion from Easten’s home on the Canterbury Plains is “planned meticulously”. She parks as close to her destination as possible.
“The car is like my safe place, kind of like my house when I’m not at home. If I’m too far away my legs start to go like jelly. I find it hard to breathe, which is a bit of a bummer when one of my favourite things is being outside in nature. I do drive into the mountains and go not too far from the car. I don’t walk for miles to get there – my car is just there!”
Paradoxically, the place where Easten feels free of panic and anxiety is when she’s performing on stage.
“For me, it’s like acting. I get to be somebody else. I find it relaxing to share my lyrics. I feel like my authentic self, but in order to get on stage I definitely channel my inner Dolly Parton. Meditating and finding a quiet space to take some deep breaths before performing is really beneficial,” she explains.
Easten recorded her 2021 album, Behind Unbroken Strings, at Auckland’s Roundhead Studios, owned by renowned musician Neil Finn.
“A major career highlight has been getting to hang out with Neil and spend time in his beautiful studio.”
The video for Country Boy, a single off the album, has aired on television in the United States, including the Country Music Network, which reaches 40 million people.
Her new single, View From Here, was the number-one video on tasteofcountry.com two weeks in a row and reached number one on the Tasmanian country charts in Australia.
In 2020 her song Cowboy Lullaby reached number 16 on the Australian Country Airplay Chart.
Easten was also a semi-finalist in an international songwriting competition in 2020 and 2021.
She hopes to tour in Australia and America soon.
“I’d like to do the whole Nashville thing.” Travelling will require focus but she can draw on the success of past trips to Hawaii and California. “I had the odd panic attack, but I got rid of them and managed really well.”
Easten started having panic attacks in her mid-teens. Her agoraphobia developed at the same time, and it was diagnosed when she was 18.
“I was feeling strange in certain places, and I had no idea it was nameable. [Crowded places] would bring on a horrible sense of dread and panic because I couldn’t get away,” she says.
School years were hard. She had a couple of friends, but Easten left her Christchurch high school at 15 because of her anxiety disorders.
“I was really stuck at home. It was just panic mode. Even in the middle of the night, when I was asleep, I’d wake up in a panic. It would just start automatically, or I could be just watching TV and not thinking about anything.”
Correspondence school didn’t work out and friendships dropped by the wayside.
“I always found it hard to hold on to friends, because people would want to do things I couldn’t and I would never go too far in explaining why,” Easten says.
“I think a lot of anxiety symptoms can come across as if you’re not interested in who you’re talking to or not listening. I’m very socially awkward and I’m always worried about how people perceive me, which causes more anxiety.”
After having “thousands and thousands’' of panic attacks, she can now end them quickly.
“I separate myself from my thinking. I sort of step away from myself. And then I view myself having the panic and tell myself that it’s all fine. It’s always been fine. ‘You’re not going to die.’ And then it stops pretty quickly, I’d say within 30 seconds.”
But agoraphobia “still sticks around”.
On a plane, Easten will think about how many movies she can watch until she reaches her destination. “I break it up into stages because I know I won’t sleep because I can’t get off the plane.
“Being on a plane is one of the places I despise the most. But because I have managed all of that before, I’m pretty sure I can do it again. Surprises are terrible and last-minute plans can make me feel terrible. Having things planned out is really helpful. I’ve got it down to an art where as long as my accommodation is on the ground floor, and I don’t have to take lifts or the stairs, I’ll be okay.”
Treating agoraphobia has been hard.
“It’s treated mostly with a therapy where people just expose themselves to feeling horrible and it’s meant to slowly start going away. But I’ve tried that so many times, and it doesn’t really help me. I tried all the medications. I went through probably four or five different kinds and none of them agreed with me, or they made the symptoms worse, or had really bad side effects. I found it was better for me to not be on those.”
Counselling and talk therapy did help.
Her music has also helped her. She began writing poems as a 10-year-old and sang in the Christchurch Children’s Choir.
“I’ve always really enjoyed singing. I think because I was at home a lot, it was one of the only things I found I was good at and enjoyed doing.”
She started playing the guitar in her 20s. “I left it a bit late because of my anxiety.”
She studied music at Ara Institute of Canterbury in 2017 after years of unsuitable jobs. Stints in a shoe store, rest home and customer service didn’t last.
“There only needed to be a bout of unusually bad agoraphobia or anxiety and I would start letting down anyone I was working for. It became quite apparent I would need to work for myself.”
She started working at home for the Ministry of Health, doing “Covid calling” during the pandemic.
“People needing to work from home opened up the world to me. So many things can be done from home. I can video-chat the doctor and have meetings. I have started to feel in charge of my life.”
She co-hosts a weekly country music radio show from home called Plains Country on Plains FM. It has online listeners all over the world.
“I think country songs are honest and raw and some of the stories in country songs are quite relatable.”
Easten grew up in South Christchurch with older siblings Lachlan and Tamsin. Her parents broke up when she was 4 and she has few memories of her father Stephen Findlay from back then.
She had a “wonderful stepfather” and a good relationship with her mother, Robyn. Easten also spent a lot of time at her grandparents’ home close by. “My brother and I were best friends, and we did a lot of stuff together.”
It was her brother that Easten texted in 2016 when she heard there’d been a murder in a small Otago coastal town.
Even though she didn’t know exactly where it had occurred, her intuition told her their father was involved in some way.
“I hadn’t seen my dad for a long time. I only saw him a handful of times since [the break-up], so we weren’t super close, but whenever I did see him, I enjoyed hanging out with him. He was a bit of a hippie, calm and arty, fun to be around.”
Easten recounts how she discovered her father had been in a longstanding “neighbours-at war situation” in Seacliff, 24km north of Dunedin.
“One night, after a whole lot of factors that sort of made him snap, he got really drunk and he murdered the neighbour and tried to kill himself afterwards. He shot himself in the face and needed reconstructive surgery. He wasn’t supposed to survive, but he did,” Easten shares.
After Findlay’s recovery in hospital, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in October 2017, with a minimum non-parole period of 11 years.
“He didn’t have too many people to visit him or too many people who would visit him. I started going, which was really hard,” Easten says. Her relationship with her father is now “really close”.
“He rings me every two days and listens to my country show every Saturday.”
Easten has been private about her life so far, but it’s time to change that.
She doesn’t think her agoraphobia will ever leave her completely, but it helps to know she’s not alone in experiencing it and that’s why she is sharing her story with Reset.
“I’ve always kept [agoraphobia] a huge secret until recently. So many people have it. The more people talk about it, the more I think I should say something. It doesn’t feel embarrassing anymore.”
Easten’s new single Somewhere I Can Stay is out now and available to stream on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music and from mirandaeasten.com
For information on panic attacks and agoraphobia, visit mentalhealth.org.nz
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