Singer/songwriter Ed Hale, who was engaged to be married to Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai in September of this year, announced this week that a date has been set, February 13th, 2010, creating a “Valentines Day Weekend in New York City for friends and family” and invitations have been mailed. The couple will hold two wedding ceremonies back to back, both in Manhattan. The first of which at 10 AM, will be a Traditional Persian Wedding, where Hale is said to be converting to Islam in order to travel with and be considered legally married to Mishel-Ghashghai in the Middle East, immediately followed by what is being called “an eclectic take on the traditional Christian Wedding,” where Mishel-Ghashghai is reportedly converting to Christianity. A reception will follow in the same location. The couple shared that they are foregoing the usual DJ and wedding band at the reception in favor of more personal group activities such as readings by different guests, a meditation on love candle ceremony, a blessing by a Tibetan Buddhist Monk from the Nechung Center, and of course several musical performances by friends of Hale’s in the rock ‘n’ roll world. In lieu of wedding cake the couple will be having the 200 year old New York Italian bakery Viniero’s provide over two-hundred and fifty fresh cannoli. The reception will also feature a string quintet with sitar performing both classical and standards, and a Traditional Persian Classical Trio. Honeymoon plans have not been announced, but the couple has set up a wedding website at TheKnot.com that lists flight and accommodation information for guests. Hale commented “The only other time I’ll ever get to have this many of all my different friends from around the world gathered in one place will probably be my funeral, if I’m that lucky, so Nahal and I really wanted to have things be more personal and manageable so we could have the opportunity to spend quality time with people we don’t get to see very often. Introduce everyone to each other. You know, like that.” When asked about the “eclectic take” comment on the couple’s upcoming nuptials, Hale said “Well I think I’ve got her talked into doing a big group Stevie Wonder sing-a-long, but I’m pretty sure she’s nixed the idea of me walking in wearing a cape and top hat.”

New Ed Hale single “Scene in San Francisco” is now available to hear free in its entirety and download on internet radio stations such as iLike, LastFM, and Jango. Transcendence singer/guitarist Ed Hale turned solo artist, albeit temporarily, with the release of this year’s acoustic flavored whisper-pop album Ballad On Third Avenue — a blatantly sentimental homage to beautiful losers and tragic lovers. The album debuted at #14 on CMJ’s Most Added Chart and has hovered at #140 in the Top 200 since its release in July, the most successful charting of the singer’s career to date. The album’s first single, the anthemic “I Walk Alone,” played on over one-hundred Triple A radio stations across the US, earning Hale crossover success and new fans in the adult contemporary market, a format far removed from Hale’s usual home in the alternative rock and college radio world. Hoping to further the success and momentum of showing the singer’s softer side, his record label (Dying Van Gogh) is releasing the album’s second single “Scene in San Francisco” in January – this time to both the Triple A market and to Top 40 radio, a bold gesture for an artist who has always been known more for eclectic inventiveness than hit-making.

New music video from the latest Ed Hale album Ballad On Third Avenue. The song “Beautiful Losers” is actually the title track and song #5 on the Transcendence singer’s newest solo album, and is entitled “Ballad On Third Avenue (Beautiful Losers)” for those wishing to download the track from iTunes. The music video was shot by photographer Flavia Molinari and edited by Roger Houdaille of the indie-rock band Ex Norwegian.

Recorded in October 2006 in Miami, Florida while recording the Transcendence album All Your Heroes Become Villains, the two-part “Happy Columbus Day” monologue video by Ed Hale was one of the very first videos posted to the YouTube channel TranscendentTV. Since that time, Hale posted over one-hundred and twenty videos of a wide variety of content to YouTube in a little more than half a year citing it as a cultural experiment. Often misunderstood, the controversial video is straight-faced, biting, sarcastic, and entirely tongue and cheek the singer claims. Happy hunting and happy Columbus Day!

Ed Hale and band just announced two new concert appearances, both in New York. The Transcendence singer/songwriter/guitarist just released his latest solo album, the critically acclaimed Ballad On Third Avenue – a melodic gem and lyrical milestone for Hale that sounds and feels like an homage to getting lost and losing in the streets of New York and still coming out winning. Tour dates so far have been few and far between; even though the album stayed in the college radio charts all summer and the first single, the anthemic “I Walk Alone”, has been tearing it up on commercial radio making Hale more and more a household name for the emo set. Dying Van Gogh Records assures that Hale will add more tour dates as the album gains more traction at radio. For now fans will have to settle for the few that crop up now and then. Two such happen to be in the Big Apple. Stay tuned for additional updates.

October 2nd, 2009 Friday Night – New York City, NY USA – Fall Fest – Christ Church – 6:30 PM. Corner of 60th st. and Park Avenue. Tickets $10 at the door. Two hours of bands. Ed Hale is one of the featured artists. Band will consist of Hale on vocals and acoustic guitar, Peter Capelle on piano, and a cellist. Will perform 4 songs from new album Ballad On Third Avenue.

November 7th, 2009 Saturday - New York City, NY USA – International Pop Overthrow Festival – 3:30 PM Sharp. Kenny’s Castaways 157 Bleecker St. New York 212 979-9762 $10 at door gets you in for all acts that day and night till midnight. FULL SIX-PIECE BAND CONCERT featuring acoustic guitar, piano, cello, bass, drums, mellotron, and vocals – performing songs from new album Ballad On Third Avenue.

CD REVIEW IN BOOTLEG MAGAZINE August 2009: Ed Hale has recorded a solo album away from his Brit Pop band Transcendence but hasn’t left the pop sentimentality too far behind, using the skill to help shape something acoustically raw and introspective. Ballad on Third Avenue is rich in memorable and pleasantly catchy songs that eschew common trappings of a larger sound in favor of recording more sparse and intimate material. It succeeds in practicing restraint and in also telling stories weaved through American landscapes. The album recalls the jingly soft sounds of late sixties bands that seemed to crystallize sugary melody versus stomping easily all over it.

The cast of supporting players is terrific (several played in Transcendence), and Hale demonstrates an enviable gift for brooding, introspective melodies that are as quietly compelling as those of Leonard Cohen or Nick Cave. And yes, they’re that good.

Singer/songwriter and longtime committed bachelor Ed Hale appears to be changing his tune. Dying Van Gogh Records confirms that Hale, 36, was formally engaged to be married on September 14th of this year to one Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai. Professionally, Mishel-Ghashghai is a chemical engineer, formerly of Microsoft, and now teaches The Avatar Course where the two are said to have met seven years ago. She is originally from the country of Iran but currently resides in the United States. Hale has long been known for passionate and emotive songs of forlorn love, longing and unrequited love and for a very public personal life, represented most notably through his online blog, the Transcendence Diaries. He is also well known for releasing songs titled with girls’ names from the seemingly endless string of public relationships he has stepped in and out of over the last fifteen years of his career. From “My Wendy” on the singer’s first album, to the minor Adult Contemporary hit “Veronica” from the Sleep With You CD, to “The Architect’s Daughter” on his latest release Ballad On Third Avenue, Hale has never been afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve; for better or worse. In the song “Girls” from the Transcendence album Sleep With You, he manages to shout out over thirty names of past flings in under three minutes and is said to be nearly finished with another new album nicknamed “The Girls Album” which features 25 new tracks, each said to be titled with a different girl’s name. Fans may recognize the name of Hale’s bride to be, Nahal, or think it subtly familiar. And they’d be right. That’s because Hale and company sing it repeatedly on the last song of the Sleep With You album, a song called “Little Tree.” The name “Nahal” literally means “little tree” in Farsi, the native language of Iran. They may also recognize her from YouTube. She is the same girl featured in the BedPeace 2008 video Hale released on YouTube at the start of the New Year. In typical fashion the couple made their quiet proposal — which took place in a row boat on a lake in Central Park in New York — very public by posting photos of it on Hale’s Facebook page. Hale has been dating Mishel-Ghashghai for two years. Hale has never been married. No wedding date is said to be set yet.

Use the chart below to look up the radio station in your town to hear the exclusive radio-edit version of the latest single “I Walk Alone” from Transcendence singer/songwriter Ed Hale‘s newest album, Ballad On Third Avenue. “I Walk Alone” had been the unanimous choice as the first single from the new disc since the album’s initial recording sessions, back in late Fall of 2008. Producer and fellow Transcendence guitarist Fernando Perdomo heard it the moment that Hale played him the song accompanied by nothing but an acoustic guitar on the first day of recording. Hale also played Perdomo forty-plus more songs that day in order for them to begin the process of deciding which songs would make it to the new album. Perdomo stated that he knew instantly that “I Walk Alone” would be the “hit song” from the album and demanded that it be the first song they record “just to make sure it made the record. You know how Ed is. He’ll play you a song once, and then won’t want to play it again and instead want to move onto something totally new. But I knew we had to get that one recorded first.”

Enter a slew of opinions from fellow musicians, fans, management, and radio promoters and normally you end up with ten songs that are bound to be “that hit song.” But in a rare occurence, time and time again, “I Walk Alone,” the second track on the album, proved to come out on top as the most obvious choice. Thanks to the good folks at FMQB, the Syndicate, the Howard Rosen Agency, and Jeff Appleton’s Marathon Music Radio Promotions, “I Walk Alone” is now currently spinning on approximately one-hundred and twenty commercial radio stations across the United States, all of which fall under the Triple A format, also known as “Adult Album Alternative.” This is a genre that is new to the singer, completely untouched and uncharted by the band — who have comfortably rotated numerous songs in the College Radio or Alt Rock radio formats for years since their formation in 2000. But there is no getting around that Ballad is a departure both lyrically and sonically, leaning much closer to a ‘singer-songwriter’ sound reminiscent of Belle and Sebastian, David Gray or even Simon and Garfunkel, rather than the Brit Pop or Modern Rock style Hale and his bandmates usually produce. 

Ballad On Third Avenue, the latest solo album from singer-songwriter Ed Hale, continued its climb up the CMJ Top 200 Chart this week jumping thirty spots to land at #145 on the college radio airplay-driven chart. According to MediaGuide and MediaBase tracking, the songs receiving the most airplay are “I Walk Alone,” “Incompatible,” and the album’s title track, a power-pop “Born to Run” for the Millenium Generation nicknamed “Beautiful Losers.” The Simon and Garfunkelesqe “It Feels Too Good” is also receiving a good number of spins. Just under four-hundred college and community radio stations across the United States and Canada are reporting spinning tracks from the singer’s first solo album in several years – making it the most successful and highest charting album in Hale’s fifteen year career. Key cities picked up last week included Philadelphia’s WKDU, WBWC out of Cleveland, and Baltimore’s XTSR. Fans of Hale’s “dayjob” – fronting the Britpop/alt-rock super-group Transcendence – might be taken by surprise by the softer, more mellow sound of the new disc, a collection of eleven intimately recorded and exclusively acoustic songs (not one electric guitar to be heard on the album’s forty-plus minutes), but Hale’s vulnerable confessional lyricism and the songs’ sparse instrumentation have if anything only broadened his audience. Interestingly the most rotated song from the album at college radio, “I Walk Alone,” also happens to be the first single at commercial radio. After fifteen years of alt-rock radio love, the first single from Ballad is instead being picked up for airplay by Adult Contemporary and Triple A stations across the US, making a potential crossover hit the next stop in the singer’s adventurous and noteworthy career, one that has been consistently marked by experimentation and forays into the unexpected.