About
Kyle “K. Edward” Smith is a drummer-turned-songwriter and composer from northern Indiana. He performs live as a solo act and fronts a band featuring flexible arrangements of musicians. Smith is also a film composer, having songs featured in independent film releases and recently producing a feature-length score in partnership with Right Brain Records.
Smith’s music has been described as “refreshingly eclectic alt-folk” (The Slow Music Movement) and fans can hear echoes of artists like John Prine, Nick Cave, Iron & Wine, and Tom Waits.
Originally cutting his teeth in the rough-and-tumble realities of the independent music underworld — most notably, touring the country as a member of the underground metal band Assimilator — Smith discovered his voice as a singer/songwriter when he started writing tender, folk-tinged tunes on a beat-up acoustic guitar he found rotting away in a neighbor’s garage.
Smith’s eclectic musical background and “rare ability to leap between musical realms” (Right Brain Records) led him quickly to experimentation.
Looking to fuse the intensity of his underground experiences with the immediacy he was discovering in folk music — and taking cues from avant-garde composers like Harry Partch — Smith oftentimes found himself making use of more and more off-kilter, thrifted, forgotten, or homemade acoustic instruments in his writing and recording.
This resulted in a strange, Americana-laced world of sounds all his own.
Taken as a whole, performances and recordings from Smith range from the delicate and intimate to the downright psychedelic and raucous.
However, within this wide scope of sonic diversity, Smith’s poetic songwriting sensibilities and textural composition palettes remain as steady threads guiding listeners through the twists and turns of his labyrinthian body of work.
Most recently, Smith is celebrating the release of Penny Picture Show: a weird, booze-fueled, rootsy collection of narrative songs roaming the streets of classic Hollywood, loosely based on Ray Bradbury’s novel A Graveyard for Lunatics.
Smith is currently based out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he lives with his wife and three cats.
In addition to performing and composing, he teaches music lessons to a handful of select students and continues to experiment and record at the orphanage for wayward instruments he calls Secondhand Studios.
You can get in touch with Kyle via email at info@kedwardsmith.com