Gone with 'The Wind and The Tide'

Ceci Miras’ home is a den of creativity.

Beyond the nondescript exterior is a household with generations of talent on display. Paintings by Miras’ grandmother, mother, aunts and cousins adorn the walls just past her front door.

Upstairs in her bedroom, the walls are decorated with an assortment of her own drawings, quotes from poems and song lyrics written on a brown paper bag. Christmas lights hang above her bed, and crafts made of old guitar strings are littered about the floor.

In the middle of it all sits a keyboard and Miras’ trusty acoustic guitar — the centerpiece both of her room and of her life.

But despite the comforts of home, and despite having written songs for 10 years, it wasn’t until the 23-year-old singer-songwriter left to study abroad last year that she could truly call herself an artist, she said.

“You have to put yourself out there to grow,” Miras said. “I think that’s why I left.”

Miras recently returned after spending a year studying songwriting at C3 College in Sydney, Australia, a Christian school specializing in leadership and creative arts.

She came back to Union City four months ago with her debut EP, The Wind and the Tide, in hand.

“It’s my journal of that year, an open diary,” she said.

The five-song collection, available now on iTunes, is both solemn and uplifting, with Miras taking the lead on guitar and captivating listeners with her soft and soothing vocals. Her college classmate, Colin Jones, produced and recorded the songs at his home in Australia, adding texture to Miras’ guitar by playing piano, drums and the xylophone on the songs.

The album title, and title track, is lifted from a Bible verse that Miras said speaks to her recent challenges and experiences.

“I think I had a greater perspective of who God was in my life,” she said. “He gives you the wind and the tide. Everything you feel that is against you or helping you — the resistance, or the acceleration of the wind and the tide — its all good for you in the end.”

Though there are religious undertones in her lyrics, the songs weren’t written with any specific audience, or religion, in mind, she said.

“I was writing what I felt purely from my heart,” she said.

Becoming a songwriter was a natural evolution for Miras, who started on her creative path by writing short stories in elementary school. She later developed a passion for indie rock, too.

“At 13, I picked up a guitar and put them together,” she said.

She also picked up drawing, craft-making and other visual arts along the way.

“I just have to be creative,” she said. “If I don’t have a song to sing or words to write, I just make what I can with what I have.”

Today, the stories she tells are filled with hope and are open to interpretation — which is what she likes most about songwriting, she said.

On “Here He Comes,” she sings about a girl waiting for something, or someone, as a metaphorical storm looms overhead:

“She wonders if she’s missed her only chance to leave / She can hear the roll of thunder / See the clouds forming into one / Here he comes, here he comes to meet her / He’s riding on the horse he left on”

“The ‘he’ could be so many things — hope, opportunity, inspiration, courage, a father,” she said.

Though she's still adjusting to life back at home, Miras said she’ll continue making music, and hopes her songs will inspire creativity in others.

“I hope my music makes people dream a little more,” she said. “I hope it speaks to them somewhere deeper or to a part of them they forgot about.”

Ceci Miras' The Wind and the Tide EP is available on iTunes. To download or stream her music, click here.