LI's Erica Zigon releases album 'Full Circle,' has song in Hyundai commercial

Singer-songwriter Erica Zigon has a hand and a heart.

The hand is her band The Zigons, which pays the bills with cover songs in gun-for-hire gigs across Long Island: The Last Word in Huntington, Dive in Kismet, Island Mermaid in Ocean Beach and many elsewheres. The heart is her band Zigs, playing all originals both on Long Island (Port Palooza in Port Jefferson) and Manhattan Island (Rockwood Music Hall, Mercury Lounge).

And one other place: Friday at 7 p.m., Zigs plays the Rockaway Beach Surf Club in Queens, at an album release party anticipating the midnight drop of the group’s first full-length album, “Full Circle,” recorded at the Westfall studio in Farmingdale.

“It's been two years in the making,” says the Oyster Bay-born and Babylon Village-raised Zigon, 30, who fronts the band with her guitarist brother Michael, “though we started playing together and writing about six, seven years ago.” Their first single, “Babe,” came out in 2018, followed by a five-song debut EP, “Note to Self,” in 2020. A couple more singles followed, including “Thinking Bout You,” a jaunty, rap-infused update of such '70s jazz/rock fusion bands as The Crusaders and Steely Dan.

“Me and my brother, we're such old souls,” says Zigon by phone from her day job at a car rental company, “so I think sometimes we were born in the wrong time. We definitely have that vintage-y, old-school feel to everything we do.”

They got their old souls the hard way. Erica, the middle child between brothers Michael and Shane, was 6 when their parents, Joey and Debra Zigon, divorced, and 8 when Debra suffered a massive stroke — leaving her comatose for a time and hospitalized for 13 years before her death in 2021. The children’s paternal grandmother, Maureen Zigon, took them in.

With their father struggling with mental health issues, “My dad’s sisters — Aunt April. Aunt Debbie and Aunt Tyshie — really stepped up, too,” Erica Zigon says. “They all came together and helped raise us.”

There were bright spots for the Babylon Junior-Senior High School graduates. Michael Zigon was accepted to a Los Angeles music academy, and began teaching music and performing on cruise ships and with a band’s Las Vegas residency. Erica, who sang in jazz vocal groups and choir in high school and played varsity lacrosse, landed a sports scholarship to the Benedictine college Saint Leo University, near Tampa, Florida, where she felt comfortable enough to come out as gay.

But during final exams her senior year, in 2016, her grandmother died. “Michael came back and stayed in New York, because Shane and I weren't OK. And that's when we started playing music together,” she says.

Serious financial issues also ensued, and Erica lived in Bay Shore for a time before moving to her present home in Astoria, Queens — and along the way, moving up the management ranks at her job and founding a nonprofit corporation to help the homeless.

Plus, she co-wrote and performed a song last year for the Hyundai Tucson car commercial branded “It’s Your Journey.” After having submitted it through a job posting, she heard nothing more, she says, until visiting friends who happened to have a Yankees game on TV.

“I heard my voice and started yelling, 'That's me! That's me!' And my friend was, like, 'What?' They didn't understand because the person on the screen wasn't me. I was so excited I couldn't get my words out. And then finally I said, 'No, I'm singing it!' And it came on four more times that day. It was a really cool moment, for sure.”