Ed Hale

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.

“Scene in San Francisco” though just might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, or in this case breaks the singer to a larger more mainstream audience. The song is melodic and catchy, so pure pop and straight ahead that it is hard at first to fathom that it comes from the same Ed Hale. It also manages to end before the four-minute mark, a milestone for an artist who has in the past filled his albums with songs up to eleven minutes in length and five different languages. “Scene in San Francisco” will hit terrestrial and satellite radio in the second week of January. But listeners can hear it now online on internet radio stations such as Pandora, Jango, Grooveshark, ReverbNation, LastFM, and iLike. They can also stream the song directly from MySpace and Facebook using iLike.

“Scene in San Francisco” is one of only a handful of songs that Hale did not co-write with writing partner Tyler Bejoian on the Ballad On Third Avenue album, claiming the song is based on a true story. Hale comments “Tyler and I were very clear on what we were trying to do with the Beautiful Losers album [the album's original title before it was changed last minute due to the book of the same name by Leonard Cohen]. Essentially we were just catharting. I don’t know if that’s really a word… but it should be. We were venting about but also celebrating that feeling of how it is when you feel like the world is caving in around you and nothing is going your way… you know, it’s easy to start to lose hope and feel like a loser. But if in the end you can still feel beautiful, if you can still find a way to love yourself… there’s survival in that. There’s hope. “Scene in San Francisco” was a song that I had written while I was working on the Transcendent Television project in this hotel in San Francisco. The song fit the motif and theme of the album Tyler and I were working on perfectly. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. She leaves him. You know, he wakes up one day and realizes that he has lost the girl. That’s the nature of this album in a nutshell, with different people. Your parents, your friends, society and the government. We’re basically on our own. But this song is true. I mean, I changed some things here and there. But it sums up an experience I had at a hotel with a girl that I fell madly in love with who ultimately left me for someone else. Her husband actually.” (laughs) “Coulda been worse I suppose. But it was important to get it out, get it in song form. That always helps. But yeah, the song is real. It’s a true story. There’s a part two though, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the next album to come out to hear about it.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 9:31 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.