While Transcendence singer/guitarist Ed Hale continues to hole up in the recording studio with other band members working on his next upcoming solo album, Dying Van Gogh Records finally announced a formal release date for the long awaited new album from the band, the much anticipated concept album entitled All Your Heroes Become Villains. The band’s last official release was 2009′s The City of Lost Children, but it was a b-sides and rarities collection. Their last album of new material was 2005′s classic Nothing Is Cohesive, considered by many to be the group’s best album to date.
But the band and its record label hope to change that. The All Your Heroes.. album is by far the most commercial, provocative and ambitious collection of songs the band has ever assembled. From start to finish the album took over four years to record, with most of the band members working straight through the night for often days at a time. Recorded in Miami, Florida at both Hit Factory Studios and Dungeon Recording Studios, the album was produced by Fred Freeman (Dashboard Confessional, New Found Glory) who also produced the band’s second album Sleep With You. Freeman purportedly worked the band tirelessly to obtain the best performances out of them. Lead singer/guitarist and chief songwriter Ed Hale felt that the time was right for the band to expand beyond albums that were mere collections of songs and instead attempt something more thematically cohesive and structured.
What came out of the process is the heaviest, deepest and darkest album the band has ever created, eleven mini-rock operas featuring a wide variety of instrumentation that take a sledge hammer to the band’s trademark Brit-pop sound and turn it into a whole new beast entirely. With song titles such as “Waiting for Godot,” “Blind Eye,” “Last Stand at the Walls of Zion” and the suicide letter in song “After Tomorrow” the album also offers a rich template of political, philosophical and emotional lyricism that is intense, thought provoking and at times sheer stunning.
The album will be officially released on November 15th nationwide and on November 17th in the United Kingdom. It will be available for pre-order exclusively on iTunes and Amazon.com on October 18th. The first single from the album is scheduled to hit college radio in mid-September and Modern Rock commercial radio stations on October 1st.
SINGER ED HALE ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED
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 2008video 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.
Nothing Is Cohesive is Out and More Ed Hale News
