A new interview with Transcendence singer Ed Hale in Exclusive Magazine. The singer, who just recently released a new solo album, Ballad On Third Avenue, and more recently surprised friends and fans by getting married to the beautiful Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai in dual Persian and Christian Ceremonies.”
‘All Hale, Ed!’
Ed Hale, the iconic singer of the rock group Transcendence, never known for doing things ‘ordinary,’ definitely did it his way in what may be the ‘interfaith wedding of the year!’
On February 13, Hale’s last Triple A radio hit single, ‘I Walk Alone,’ no longer applied to him as he and the beautiful Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai, began their life together in a style that crosses all cultural barriers.
At a church on the corner of Park Avenue in New York City, they were joined in a formally Islamic fashion in a traditional Persian wedding, followed immediately by a traditional Christian wedding.
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Ed Hale about all this, and first wondered, being that he just married his soul-mate (congratulations!) in a Multi-Interfaith, one-of-a-kind wedding, if he could kindly explain this a little more. “Thank you for the congrats. Nahal and I knew that if we were going to have a wedding that it needed to be special. Something that was bigger than just the binding of the two of us as one. If we wanted to do that, we could have just eloped off alone the two of us and done it privately. But we felt a responsibility to our friends and fans and family… we wanted to share it.”
“Many people already knew our story. How long we had been together. How in love we were. Always the iconoclast, I wasn’t too knowledgable about weddings per se, but I knew that if I was going to get married in public that it had to be about more than just the two of us. So we really worked hard at this idea of ‘celebrating love,’ in all its shapes and forms… rather than just making it about us.”
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ED HALE IN STUDIO RECORDING NEW SOLO ALBUM

So in predictable untraditional fashion, fans will get THREE new albums by the band in one six month period. It is a sign of the generally confused state of the music business itself at this time. To make matters more confusing the band was almost finished recording the 24 song two-disc set nicknamed “the girls album” (due to all of the songs being about and having girl’s names in the titles) – the actual title being L’intrigue de Femme and Finding Francesca – but the recording of that album was postponed midway through production in 2007 with no word on when they will resume work on it.
So what to do? Evidently, record another album! Less than a week after meeting with Iran President Ahmadinejad during the United Nations General Assembly Meeting, Hale flew down to Miami, Florida to spend five weeks in the studio with fellow TRANSCENDENCE guitarist Fernando Perdomo – who is also playing the role of producer on this one – to record a new solo album set to be released in early 2009. This will be Hale’s first solo album since 1996′s Acoustic in New York.

Ed Hale started his singing career solo, releasing his first album EDDIE at the age of 18, then joined a band for several years, BROKEN SPECTACLES (which also launched the solo career of singer/songwriter Matthew Sabatella), then went solo again, releasing Spectacularly Broken and Acoustic In New York, and then formed a new band, TRANSCENDENCE, who have released six albums to date. So does this mean Hale is going solo again? The band and its label insist not at all, but that instead the album simply affords Hale an opportunity to record and release songs that are not “typical TRANSCENDENCE style material.”

“I wouldn’t call the album folk,” Hale says. “It’s more like singer/songwriter music, or “whisper pop” if there is such a thing. Because the sound of the album is so quiet and intimate.” When pressed for more of what the album will sound like he mentions Nick Drake, Donovan, Kings of Convenience, Jack Johnson, David Grey, and even Bob Dylan. “In TRANSCENDENCE we are really lucky in that we’re all pretty open minded so we are able to get away with recording a wide variety of styles of music. More than most bands are able to get away with. But we’re still essentially a rock band and limited to that TRANSCENDENCE sound, whatever that is. So these are all just songs that would never make it onto a TRANSCENDENCE album, because they wouldn’t fit our sound. And frankly I dig that we’re all doing little side projects like this now. This is an album I’ve wanted to do for years. I’m very happy and excited to be doing this. It’s like I have to pinch myself. It’s the most personal thing I’ve ever done. That’s for sure. A lot of just me and the guitar.”

Hale is currently blogging about the recording of the album on his Transcendence Diaries blog, and will be posting photos and clips of the songs as they are completed to his website www.edhale.com and Facebook page. Stay tuned for more.