IT SHOULDN’T BE possible to leave a band before you’ve even joined, but that’s what it was like for Tim Smudski and San Jose’s Emerald Hill. Smudski’s friends Kyle Drury and Rosa Leonardo refer to his struggle with heroin addiction as the time he “left.” While he was holed up in a hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Drury and Leonardo were living together and making music, but something was missing from their new band.
When he kicked the habit and came back to town, they immediately asked him to join the Emerald Hill. “We always knew we wanted Tim in the band, but he was just—gone,” says Drury. “It didn’t feel complete until Tim.”
Smudski quickly realized how much he’d been missed. “My first show was weird,” he says. “After we finished, everyone was coming up to me saying, ‘We’re so proud of you!’ I felt like I had just played a Little League game.”
Drury and Smudski had been playing in bands together since they met in eighth grade at Campbell Middle School.
“He had good ideas; I always thought he was really smart,” says Drury. “Everything he played didn’t sound like anything else. Even when we were 13 and he played guitar, it didn’t sound like Nirvana.”
Fittingly, the Emerald Hill is a band that sounds like nothing this side of the 415 area code. Bands in San Jose don’t last long, and usually stick to a guitar-bass-drums makeup. The Emerald Hill, on the other hand, build their music around guitars, banjos and whatever else they can find. The willingness to work with whatever they can get their hands on has evolved into the sound that sets them apart.
For example, at a recent practice in the living room of the San Jose house where singer Leonardo grew up, just on the other side of the Cupertino border. “Look, my friend just gave me this,” says Drury, picking up a small item off the bookshelf. “It’s a jaw harp. Do you know what to do with this?” He sticks it in his mouth and plucks it. “Ow,” he says as it strikes his front teeth.
Their current sound is a perfect storm of their influences. For Leonardo, it’s the musical theater she grew up with. “I always loved singing, but musical theater is all about singing other people’s songs. I wanted to try singing my own.”
Their songs tell dark and descriptive fairy tales.”Kite Song” is front-porch folk, “Dr. Appleseed” has a dirty stomp with a Silversteinian storyline, and the as-yet-untitled song they are practicing in Rosa’s living room sounds like a death knell.
Even though they don’t fit the South Bay mold, they’re not leaving anytime soon.
“When you get down to it, this is my home, this is all our homes. The idea of moving to the city and trying to become successful is really daunting,” says Leonardo.
Luckily, there’s been a resurgence of local bands with an unorthodox sound, with the Mumlers the most visible among them. So not fitting into a mold is actually getting the Emerald Hill some notice, and probably what’s catching the eye of locals. Having played their CD release at the Art Boutiki at a South First Friday event, they’re becoming more and more associated with the downtown arts movement.
“We’re really happy to be riding the crest of that wave,” says Drury. “Just in the last month, people have started showing interest. We used to be golf ball size; now we’re softball size,” says Leonardo. Then, to clarify: “Well, if U2 is, like, the size of a country.”
THE EMERALD HILL perform April 28 at 9pm at the Blank Club, 44 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose; free.
