SANTA FE DEBUT

Indie folk band Magic Giant to play ‘proper show’ in the City Different

When Zambricki Li drives into Santa Fe this week, he will be performing a proper show for the first time.

The excitement is difficult to contain.

“We’ve come through briefly,” he says. “But it was never for a proper show. We can’t wait to get onstage and become part of the fun.”

Li is a member of the indie folk outfit Magic Giant. The band is rounded out by Austin Bisnow and Brian Zaghi.

The band formed in Los Angeles in 2014 and has released one full-length album and two EPs.

The most recent EP is “In the Wind — Acoustic” which features five acoustic tracks from the band’s 2017 album, “In the Wind.”

Li says picking the five songs for the EP was difficult.

“We did it in four days,” he says with a laugh. “We couldn’t do more than five, though we did have a sixth song, ‘Celebrate the Reckless,’ that will be released at some point.”

Li says the band worked with cello and viola mostly in stripping down the songs.

“The tracks are a lot darker than the originals,” he says.

The impetus behind the acoustic EP was to let the band members revisit the first album.

“A lot of this record was written on the road. We were recording the main version of the album, and we had a Sprinter bus that we put solar panels on,” he says. “We did the festival circuit and built the songs up in a big way. We really wanted to strip them back down to when we were cruising around the redwood trees.”

Li says stripping down the songs allowed the band to showcase the lyrics in a different way.

“The original tracks, you could get lost in the sonics of it,” he says. “We wanted to be framed around the story and songs.”

Li says getting three musicians into a room is a win.

The band members work together and around one another’s schedules.

Bisnow co-wrote and produced the title track for David Guetta’s “Listen,” featuring John Legend.

Li studied under fiddle player Buddy Spicher and songwriter Cowboy Jack Clement. He also wrote an original song for the film “Paper Heart.”

And Zaghi is a salsa dancer and was a member of the Los Angeles Junior Philharmonic Orchestra while he was growing up.

“The majority wins when it comes to how decisions are made about music,” he says. “We do have something called a veto. One of us can pull a veto card if we really feel strongly about it. In the end, passion wins, and we don’t question that.”