NEWCOMER ED HALE ABOUT TO BREAK INTO THE TOP 10 WITH “NEW ORLEANS DREAMS”

Newcomer to the Adult Contemporary radio format Ed Hale, who also happens to have a second new album up for release in 2011 as the singer of the eccentric indie-rock group Transcendence (now renamed “Ed Hale and The Transcendence), looks to be headed for the Top 10 next week. This marks one of the few occasions a non-major label “indie” artist has been able to achieve such a feat. This week’s chart available here.
Breaking into the Top 40 is accomplishment enough. The Top 20 even more so. Once one crosses the Top 10 barrier the competition becomes fierce. But in the newly transformed music business, the old record company models are shifting faster than the labels seem able to keep up with. The best example of this was the recent shock when the break up and sell off of long time stalwart EMI was announced. All of this shifting about makes it appear that the playing field has been leveled, allowing more room for independent artists to reach the same fanbase that major label artists are able to. But Hale, who has been signed to both major and smaller independent labels over his fifteen year career, claims that the terrain is still wrought with challenges for independent musicians attempting to make a living at the art of music making.

TRANSCENDENCE SINGER ED HALE TALKS DEATH AND THE BAND’S NEW SINGLE “SOLARIS”

Out of the 11 songs on the new Ed Hale & the Transcendence album, All Your Heroes Become Villains, there are only 3 that offer any kind of hope, optimism, or hopefulness: track 3 entitled “Solaris,” track 6 “Here it Comes,” and the album closer “Last Stand at the Walls of Zion.” The rest of the album is a dark heavy brooding downward spiral into the lead character’s disillusionment with everything in the world and his own personal life. From the album’s trance-hop meets operatic opening — which starts with a slow dirge-like rhythm and then builds to a climactic crescendo of dissonance punctuated by two competing melodies played by a trombone and guest vocalist Dee Dee Wilde’s gorgeous gospel-tinged wailing — all the way through to the album’s closing track, All Your Heroes Become Villains feels and sounds like the perfect soundtrack to the end of the world.


Song by song the lead character vents his anger and disappointment with the society he lives in and his own personal life, aiming his rage at everything from the political system (“Blind Eye” and “We Are Columbine”) to God and religion (“Waiting for Godot”) to friendship and romance (“Indian Princess” and “Messed it Up Again”). The climax of the album is track #10, the majestic seven-minute ‘suicide letter in a song’ the band entitles “After Tomorrow” (already a favorite among adventurous college radio DJs) where it becomes clear that the lead character has had enough of blaming the world around him and has turned inward only to discover that he doesn’t have what it takes to continue any further in a world full of hate, war, disease, crime and betrayal.
And yet amongst all this drama and pathos there is the beauty and hopefulness of the song “Solaris.” In their traditional Britpop meets post-modern rock style, Ed Hale and company deliver a near perfect pop song clocking in at three minutes and thirty seconds that shines a bit of light on the stage of their apocalyptic rock opera. Sweet and tender and yet mysterious, “Solaris” seems at first to be a love song. But the female character being sung to doesn’t appear to even be alive, at least not alive in the traditional sense; on planet Earth. Rather, the lead character sounds as if he is singing to someone far removed from all his earthly troubles, someone who is far far away, living in another galaxy or star system called “Solaris.”
Lead singer Ed Hale summed it up this way, “A girl I knew, someone very close to me, had just passed away. And I found it impossible to deal with emotionally. Right around the same time, I had a chance to see the DVD of this beautiful movie called “Solaris” starring George Clooney. This movie is a trip. Very slow. You have to flow with it. It was based on the book by Stanislaw Lem. Seeing that movie hit me at the right time. I had my guitar with me of course and while I was watching the film I just started strumming these chords and creating this song about my friend… What I did really, was just place her, Julia, into the movie… in order to bring her back to life for myself. I just felt that because it was unbearable to contemplate her passing that at the very least I could make her alive in some other form, like she’s still living but in a different dimension. So the song “Solaris” is me, or the lead character of the album I guess, singing a prayer to her or for her, talking to her… asking her how she’s doing… like “how’s life in your new world Julia?” It made me feel better. And although it isn’t enough to keep the lead character alive by the end of the album, I think it gives him some hope along the way to his final decision… like that.”

STREAM IT


Own The Album

NEW TRANSCENDENCE SONG “SOLARIS” FEATURED ON CMJ FREEPLAY COMPILATION

Those editors at the College Music Journal (CMJ) sure have good taste! The November installment of the CMJ monthly mixtape is ready! As always it features the hottest tracks by the most cutting-edge artists before their albums are released to the public and is available as a free download for anyone who works at college or Triple A radio. This month’s CMJ FreePlay features the brand new Ed Hale and The Transcendence song “Solaris” from their long-awaited new album All Your Heroes Become Villains.
Here’s the full Tracklist:
01. Cubic Zirconia – Take Me High 
02. Thee Oh Sees – Carrion Crawler 
03. Summer Camp – Better Off Without You 
04. Tycho – Hours 
05. Sepalcure – See Me Feel Me 
06. Ed Hale And The Transcendence – Solaris 
07. Caithlin De Marrais – Hot Day 
08. Russian Circles – Mladek 
09. Glass Rifle – Foebic 
10. Andrew Bird – Hospital 
11. Zambri – Heather 
12. Zun Zun Egui – Fandango Fresh 
13. DRC Music – Hallo (featuring Tout Puissant and Nelly Liyemge) 
14. King Midas Sound – One Ting Dabrye Rework 
15. Robin Bacior – Ohio 
16. Ritmo Machine – Welcome To The Ritmo Machine
17. Trentemøller – Neverglade (Trentemøller Remix)
Thank you for a great CMJ 2011! Relive the memories with our CMJ Music Marathon & Film Festival recap.

NEW TRANSCENDENCE SONG “SOLARIS” FEATURED ON CMJ FREEPLAY COMPILATION

Those editors at the College Music Journal (CMJ) sure have good taste! The November installment of the CMJ monthly mixtape is ready! As always it features the hottest tracks by the most cutting-edge artists before their albums are released to the public and is available as a free download for anyone who works at college or Triple A radio. This month’s CMJ FreePlay features the brand new Ed Hale and The Transcendence song “Solaris” from their long-awaited new album All Your Heroes Become Villains.
Here’s the full Tracklist:
01. Cubic Zirconia – Take Me High 
02. Thee Oh Sees – Carrion Crawler 
03. Summer Camp – Better Off Without You 
04. Tycho – Hours 
05. Sepalcure – See Me Feel Me 
06. Ed Hale And The Transcendence – Solaris 
07. Caithlin De Marrais – Hot Day 
08. Russian Circles – Mladek 
09. Glass Rifle – Foebic 
10. Andrew Bird – Hospital 
11. Zambri – Heather 
12. Zun Zun Egui – Fandango Fresh 
13. DRC Music – Hallo (featuring Tout Puissant and Nelly Liyemge) 
14. King Midas Sound – One Ting Dabrye Rework 
15. Robin Bacior – Ohio 
16. Ritmo Machine – Welcome To The Ritmo Machine
17. Trentemøller – Neverglade (Trentemøller Remix)
Thank you for a great CMJ 2011! Relive the memories with our CMJ Music Marathon & Film Festival recap.

ALL YOUR HEROES BECOME VILLAINS DEBUTS AT #16 ON THE CMJ MOST ADDED CHART

For long-time colleagues, coworkers,  family, fans and friends — YOU DID IT! The long awaited new studio album from Ed Hale and The Transcendence, All Your Heroes Become Villains, officially hits retail and online music stores at midnight on November 15th. In the meantime, it hit College Radio stations all across America last week, three-hundred and fifty of them to be exact, and debuted at #16 on the CMJ(College Music Journal) Most Added Chart! This is the highest debut on the College Radio Chart in the band’s nine year history.
Each and every member of the band is ecstatic that this album is finally being released after so long and so much work; even better that it was received so well in its first week out to college, satellite and non-comm radio stations. All Your Heroes… is the band’s fifth studio album and was a long time in the making as many of you know. Ed Hale and crew first started tracking the foundational songs for the album at Criteria/The Hit Factory in 2004! After a long hard bumpy ride with all the changes in the music industry, a professional and official release of this album seemed nearly impossible; which was a major bummer for the band, because we honestly believe that All Your Heroes Become Villains is the best album we’ve ever made. But with a whole lotta persistence, years of work in the studio, more phone calls, video conferences, lunches, meetings and pavement pounding than we’d care to remember, it’s now official.
Transcendence first and foremost is a “band.” Featuring Ed Hale on vocals and guitar, Fernando Perdomo on guitar and bass and vocals, Ricardo Mazzi on drums, Allan Gabay on piano and keyboards, and the inimitable Roger Houdaille on Bass guitar and vocals. But we also had a ton of help from other local and national guest musicians while creating this album, which is the darkest, heaviest, moodiest, “thickest” for lack of a better word and most ambitious album of our career together. Singer/songwriter/producer/engineer Zach Ziskin added some additional lead guitar work. Karen Feldner as always lent her beautiful vocals. Dee Dee Wilde added additional background vocals. As did Matthew Sabatella. Leor Manellis added extra drumming. And Emiliano Torres added trumpet. (We still cannot remember the name of the guy who played the trombone — if you know, please drop us a line). DJ Kamran Green flew in from California to add trance-hop loops and beats.
The album was produced and mixed by Ed Hale and Fred Freeman at Dungeon Recording Studios. Rudi Meewuen and Joe Syring acted as second engineers. Gina Rowland took care of the artwork and band photography – along with Starbucks every morning. Susie Aminian and Flavia Molinari took care of the CD packaging. The album is reaching national media in America by Janelle Rogers and her team at Green Light Go PR and European Media by James Parish and Jay Taylor at Prescription PR in the UK. Ariel Publicity and Cyber PR are handling online promotions. Reverend Moose and Ryan Prieto at The Syndicate are handling College Radio Promotions. And Commercial radio at Adult Contemporary is being handled by South Beach Marketingand Promotion’s Amanda Alexandrakis. Big thank yous also to the DJ Holly Haze for her ears re the first single “Blind Eye.” And also to Johnny Chiba at CMJ for all his support. We couldn’t have created this album, nor the buzz around it without any one of these talented individuals. Thank you to all of you!

ED HALE ENTERS RADIO FORMAT #3 WITH A “TASTE OF TRIPLE A” FEATURE

Ed Hale’s first solo album in years, Ballad On Third Avenue, has charted a lot of territory for the transcendent singer/guitarist in the last year. Upon its release the album went first to college radio and spent several months on the CMJ Top 200, a radio format very familiar with both Hale and the indie-rock collective he sings and plays guitar in, Transcendence. Being a softer acoustic endeavor, the album’s second single “New Orleans Dreams” then went to the Adult Contemporary format, where it’s enjoying spins on 200+ stations and still rising up the Top40 chart (currently #33). In October the album will begin spinning on Triple A radio stations across the country. “New Orleans Dreams” is the third track on the October 2011 edition of A Taste of Triple A compilation CD, a long running tastemaker series of “all things Triple A radio” founded by revered radio veteran Jim Nelson. The CD also features tracks by the B-552s, Indigo Girls, and Oasis’s Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.
The plot thickens as the release date for the new Ed Hale and The Transcendence album, All Your Heroes Become Villains, approaches (Nov. 15th). The “Villains” album is set to hit College Radio on October 25th, and Alt-Rock Specialty Show stations on December 1st, both formats the band has charted in numerous times over the years. In the second week of January 2012 the band will release two singles simultaneously to two additional radio formats, the dark and heavy rocker “Blind Eye” to Modern Rock, and the lushly arranged pop ballad “Solaris” will begin spinning on Adult Contemporary radio stations. Of course there is a chance that Triple A stations may get in on the action and pick up on “Solaris” as well. One thing is for certain: there will be no shortage of Hale or his fellow bandmates in Transcendence on the radio over the next six months.

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.

UNRELEASED VERSION OF HALE’S “BEAUTIFUL LOSERS” TO APPEAR ON CMJ SAMPLER CD

A rare and unreleased radio-edit version of the song “Ballad On Third Avenue (Beautiful Losers)”  from Ed Hale’s new solo album Ballad On Third Avenue will appear on the College Music Journal’s New Music Sampler CD due to be released to subscribers only on Monday July 20th, 2009. The song has been one of the primary focus tracks for the over three-hundred college radio stations across the United States and Canada currently spinning the new album, along with tracks “Architect’s Daughter,” and “New Orleans Dreams.” The lyrics of the song were cowritten with sixteen year old up and comer Tyler Bejoian, who also cowrote four other songs on the new disc. CMJ has long been the go-to source for the newest most cutting edge music for those who want to know what the public will be listening to six months to a year from now and have been going strong since 1978. Details below.
CMJ New Music Monthly #156 // New Music Report #1112
Cover date: Mon, July 20
Starting this July and continuing monthly thereafter, the monthly print edition of CMJ New Music Report will increase its circulation to include CMJ New Music Monthly subscribers and rebrand itself as CMJ New Music, including enhanced editorial content as well as its current suite of extensive radio and chart data. The issue will be co-numbered CMJ New Music Report #1112 and CMJ New Music Monthly #156. CMJ New Music, with a redesigned format and expanded readership totaling nearly 10,000, will be mailed to subscribers of both magazines, including college and non-commercial radio reporters, music industry subscribers, and early-adopter active music tastemakers.  Accompanying each monthly issue will be a digital music compilation made available to all subscribers via CMJ.com.  CMJ New Music Report will continue to published online via 48 PDF issues annually, inclusive of these special monthly print editions.

ED HALE NEW SOLO ALBUM DEBUTS AT #14 ON COLLEGE RADIO MOST ADDED CHART

Turning the volume down low and showing a softer side has paid off for Transcendence singer and chief songwriter Ed Hale on his newest solo offering. The life or death drama and pathos and over the top emotionalism and passion that listeners are accustomed to hearing from the vocalist are still intact on the new solo set; in fact they’re even more highlighted due to the toned down and hushed atmosphere created by Hale, who co-produced the album along with fellow Transcendence guitarist (and Dreaming In Stereo frontman) Fernando Perdomo. Not only will Ballad On Third Avenue be the singer’s first album to receive airplay on commercial radio nationwide out of the gate, but the new acoustic whisper-pop collection of 11 songs debuted at #14 on college radio’s CMJ Top 200 Most Added Chart this week, the highest debut in the singer’s 20 year career. Out of 200 albums currently spinning on college radio this week it is a remarkable achievement considering Hale has not toured in several years and is a relative unknown compared to the behemoth his better known band Transcendence has become over the last ten years.
Besides a praise-worthy debut, the album also notably picked up several key taste-maker stations including WKBU of Drexel University, WONC in Chicago, IL, and Newark’s WSOU – stations that usually indicate just how well an album might fare months before the final numbers are calculated. If commercial radio follows suit and is successful for Hale’s new solo effort (his first single “I Walk Alone” will be released to Triple A stations all over the United States on August 2nd), Transcendence may find themselves attempting to transcend not only thier own past successes, but the current success of a very edgy strategy – three members of the group have all released successful solo albums this quarter (bassist Roger Houdaille fronts the indie rock sensation of the month Ex Norwegian who have taken the music blog world by storm). The success of the singer’s new solo album only adds to the excitement and anticipation for the band’s new album All Your Heroes Become Villains due to be released in September of this year.

NEW ED HALE ALBUM HITS COLLEGE RADIO STATIONS ACROSS US

The new Ed Hale solo album Ballad On Third Avenue is now spinning at over 350 college radio stations across the United States and Canada and is expected to hit the CMJ Top 20 Most Added Album List next week. See the list here for the station in your town and listen in. As always call-ins from fans are very cool. For the new CD, Hale will be conducting on-air interviews with stations across the country and many stations are also holding contests for fans to win free autographed copies of the new CD or t-shirts and other memorabilia. More info can be had by tuning in to your local college, community, or university radio station for details. In today’s singles-oriented atmosphere, college radio still holds the distinct advantage over commercial radio in that they are serviced with entire albums by artists – rather than just “the newest hit single” – and never afraid to dig deep they are usually more than eager to play the more rare, less-heard, or experimental tracks from new albums. All hail college radio for staying true to this vision and offering music fans this invaluable service. The college radio campaign for Ballad On Third Avenue is being handled by The Syndicate.
The first single from the new album, “I Walk Alone,” hits commercial radio stations across the US next week. A new update with a commercial station list for every town will be posted in the next few weeks. Stay tuned.