It’s a dream come true for eclectic singer/songwriter Ed Hale of the rock group Ed Hale and the Transcendence (formerly Transcendence). His latest single “New Orleans Dreams” has risen to the #43 position on the FMQB Adult Contemporary Chart this week and once again hit the Top 5 Most Added Songs of the Week Chart for the fourth consecutive week since its release.
For long time fans of Ed Hale the news has got to be as much a “dream come true” as it is for the singer. Hale has been a favorite with critics and tastemakers since his debut album release nearly nine years ago, but he has never achieved major commercial radio success. That is until now. Fans can feel free to pinch themselves all they want and still tune their radios to “those stations that play the softer hit songs” on the FM dial to hear the indie artist singing the “Radio Edit” version of his song “New Orleans Dreams” from his latest solo album Ballad On Third Avenue.
Fans are encouraged to put their listening ears on and get those fingers out. The next few weeks will be crucial for Hale and fans as the higher the song rises so too does the competition. In uncharted waters much like the floods of the post-Katrina South that Hale sings about in the song, “New Orleans Dreams” needs to rise just three more spots to enter the Top 40 Chart where it will be greeted by such regulars as Adele, Coldplay, Train, One Republic, and Lady Gaga. A big coup for the New York based boutique indie record label Dying Van Gogh. And an even bigger coup for an artist like Hale who has never wavered from continuously releasing music regardless of which “format of radio” plays his albums or not.
Of course a Top 40 hit single less than two months before the long awaited new Transcendence album All Your Heroes Become Villains is released could do wonders for the modern rock outfit who haven’t released an album of new material in almost five years. Three of the band members released solo albums in the interim: Hale, bassist Roger Houdaille formed the indie rock sensations known as Ex Norwegian, and lead guitarist Fernando Perdomo formed the “prog-pop” super group Dreaming in Stereo.
ED HALE’S BALLAD ON THIRD AVENUE CONTINUES ITS CLIMB UP THE CHARTS
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 Balladis 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.