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“Still finding myself obsessed with a quiet secret subtle and almost constant gnawing at my insides about the unbearable sadness of how temporal and impermanent everything is. Our lifetimes are short here. I remind myself that it is up to me to find meaning each day while I am here. I try to live my life to its fullest and even then I cannot shake the deep underlying knowing that they are all just moments lived and then soon forgotten. Where is the meaning in that?”

Ed Hale -– from The Transcendence Diaries

 

Singer Ed Hale in recording studio Miami FL
Ed Hale in recording studio Miami, FL Photo by Gina Rowland

Ed Hale is a hard man to keep up with. Currently enjoying international airplay on radio stations all over the world with his latest hit singles “The Prince of New York”, “Tell You True” and “Summer Flowers”, the latest releases from his new album, the critically acclaimed SO FOR REAL. The album appeared on several “Best Albums of the Year” lists in 2018.

So For Real by Ed Hale album cover
So For Real by Ed Hale

The songs continued the sound and style that Hale and his Transcendence bandmates perfected on Hale’s BALLAD ON THIRD AVENUE album, which catapulted the singer into the Billboard Adult Contemporary Top 40 for the first time. Prior to BALLAD ON THIRD, the singer had carved out a comfortable niche in the College Radio and Alternative Rock Charts for the last 20 years of his genre-bending career either solo or with the band Transcendence. Hale and drummer Ricardo Mazzi formed the group in the year 2000. Soon after guitarist Fernando Perdomo, bassist Roger Houdaille, keyboardists Jon Rose and Allan Gabay and second drummer Bill Sommer joined the fray to complete the lineup. Through the years, other long-term honorary members and contributors to the band’s output have been guitarist and vocalist Zach Ziskin — who also mixes and masters all the band’s albums, vocalist Matthew Sabatella — who was in the band Broken Spectacles with Hale in the 90s and vocalist Karen Feldner, all of whom can be heard in abundance on the twelve albums Hale or the band have released.

Ed Hale and the Transcendence in Dungeon Studios. Miami, FL
Ed Hale and the Transcendence in Dungeon Studios. Miami, FL

He also recently released the first single from his next new album, the title track “Born to Lose”, a far departure from the clean and polished sound of the SO FOR REAL album. Word is that Hale and band recorded and have plans to release a total of four new albums in the coming year.

Born To Lose by Ed Hale on Spotify
Born To Lose by Ed Hale on Spotify

Their last album before SO FOR REAL was a raucous foray into garage-pop entitled THE GREAT MISTAKE, an upbeat indie rock affair with a dash of seventies glam rock thrown in. It featured the hit singles “ManChildWoman”, “Monday”, “Baby Bop” and “I Remember You”.

The Great Mistake by Ed Hale & the Transcendence New Album Promo Video


The Great Mistake by Ed Hale and the Transcendence album promo video

The Great Mistake album cover by Ed Hale and The Transcendence
The Great Mistake by Ed Hale and The Transcendence

Ed Hale is probably best known as the singer, songwriter and guitarist of the eclectic Brit-pop/indie rock band Transcendence, also known as Ed Hale and the Transcendence, or for the four hit singles that his last solo album Ballad On Third Avenue produced, “New Orleans Dreams”, “I Walk Alone” “It Feels Too Good”, and “Scene in San Francisco”.

album cover of New Orleans Dreams by Ed Hale
New Orleans Dreams by Ed Hale — album cover

He has released ten studio albums over the last ten years, either with the band Transcendence or solo. His solo album Ballad on Third Avenue (Dying Van Gogh Records) was a lighter sounding eleven song acoustic-leaning singer/songwriter venture heavy on mood, emotion and lyrics that Hale described as “whisper-pop.” The style of music on the album is reminiscent of Nick Drake, Bright Eyes, Kings of Convenience, Rubber Soul era Beatles, Belle and Sebastian, or Simon and Garfunkel. It was a bold step in a new direction for Hale and the band, who were more well-known in the college radio market or the commercial alt-rock radio world up until this album’s release.
Ballad On Third Avenue by Ed Hale promotional video

Ballad On Third Avenue by Ed Hale album cover
Ballad On Third Avenue by Ed Hale

Ironically the Ballad On Third Avenue album became the most successful of the singer’s career. Upon its release it debuted at #14 on the CMJ Most Added Chart and stayed in the CMJ Top 200 all summer long. It was named “one of the Best Albums of 2009” by New Times Magazine and continued to enjoy increasing popularity by a succession of hit singles, especially “Scene in San Francisco”, which entered the Billboard Adult Contemporary Top 30 Chart (as measured by Mediabase) in less than five weeks after its release and peaked at #24 where it stayed for another six weeks. Hale’s prior single from the album was the delicate acoustic ballad entitled “New Orleans Dreams” which broke into the Top 10 in the Adult Contemporary radio format on FMQB, preceded by “I Walk Alone” which peaked at #25. This was the first time Ed Hale had been in the softer leaning Adult Contemporary radio format, but it does not mean to imply Hale is going soft. On the contrary, many critics noted that the band’s follow-up release, the conceptual rock-opera-esque All Your Heroes Become Villains was one of the heaviest and moodiest of their twelve year history. It produced the hit singles “Waiting for Godot”, “Solaris”, “Messed it Up Again” and “Blind Eye”, all Alt-rock radio staples.

All Your Heroes Become Villains by Ed Hale and the Transcendence Promo Video

 

Ed Hale All Your Heroes Become Villains album in CMJ magazine
All Your Heroes Become Villains by Ed Hale and the Transcendence album in CMJ Magazine

Hale has not toured in a few years, not since the success of Ballad On Third Avenue. To promote that album Hale toured the United States and Canada with his five piece band that also added two cellists to the mix. The new lush, hushed and seated approach the singer chose for that tour created an engaging, hypnotic effect for audiences from New York to Los Angeles and Miami to Vancouver. There has been no mention of any upcoming tours as of late. But Hale does continue to make the rounds in the media – doing over one-hundred interviews for the SO FOR REAL album, and doing numerous radio and television interviews in major markets. He also still finds time to make guest appearances at numerous human rights rallies and demonstrations and to travel to remote areas of the world to do volunteer and Civilian Diplomacy work.

Ed Hale with American flag in New York
Ed Hale on 9/11 ten year anniversary New York, NY

Over the last ten years Ed Hale, along with his bandmates, has been written about, interviewed and reviewed in magazines, webzines, podcasts, blogs, and newspapers all over the world and has toured throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.

Singer Ed Hale Interview in Japan's Nikkeibp World Watch magazine
Singer Ed Hale Interview in Japan’s Nikkeibp World Watch magazine

A darling with music critics for two decades for their unique, passionate, and selfishly eccentric sound and style, Ed Hale and the Transcendence – which is more of a “collective” than a singular rock band strictly speaking – is a highly prolific outfit.

Though the band was forced into a three year exile in 2006 due to the massive changes and upheaval in the music business at the time that created a legal dispute with their distributor, the band stayed in the recording studio and continued to produce new music — this absence created a large backlog of unreleased material which resulted in Hale releasing three new albums in the same year (All Your Heroes Become Villains and Ballad On Third Avenue and The Great Mistake), as well as another five more unreleased albums waiting in the wings. Along with the just released SO FOR REAL, the artist is scheduled to release the follow-up, BORN TO LOSE later this year, followed by ANOTHER DAY IN THE APOCALYPSE, and then WELCOME TO THE REST OF THE WORLD. The band has also been working on finishing the long-in-the-making 24 song set entitled L’NTRIGUE DE FEMME — FINDING FRANCESCA, a two-disc set originally meant for release in 2015.

Ed Hale and The Transcendence have been consistently played on college and commercial radio stations around the United States, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia and have released ten albums in the last ten years. Their world-music meets modern rock debut Rise and Shine gave them their first taste of commercial success with the song “Better Luck Next Time” and other popular songs such as “Mother”, “Do you know who you are” and “The Journey”. The album was the first to feature Hale singing in a variety of different languages, sometimes within one song, such as French, Spanish and Portuguese, like on the title track “Rise and Shine” and the cover of the Brasilian classic “So Quero Um Xodo”.

ED HALE AND THE TRANSCENDENCE – The Rise And Shine CD Release Concert

 

Rise and Shine album cover by Ed Hale and the Transcendence
Rise and Shine by Ed Hale and the Transcendence

Their second album Sleep With You was a major commercial breakthrough for the band yielding four hit singles in the Alternative Rock radio format– “Superhero Girl”, “Girls” “Vicodin”, and “Minnie Driver” – and climbing to #24 on the Modern Rock Charts in the US.

Sleep With You album cover by Ed Hale and the Transcendence
Sleep With You by Ed Hale and the Transcendence

Their third album Nothing Is Cohesive – which many assert is their best – was honored as “one of the most important albums of the year” in 2005 by HellFire, NotLame, and PowerPop Magazines and featured three popular hit singles – “I Wanna Know Ya”, “Somebody Killed the DJ”, the fan favorite “Caetano”, and the heart-wrenching “All This is Beginning To Feel Like An Ending”.

Nothing Is Cohesive album cover by Ed Hale and the Transcendence
Nothing Is Cohesive by Ed Hale and the Transcendence

  For more information watch the documentary Everything Is Cohesive  about the musical group Ed Hale and the Transcendence that follows the band around on tour and in the studio that aired on public television in 2004 just before the release of their new CD Nothing is cohesive. Takes a look at past albums and individual band members share stories. Featuring interviews with the band and live footage. In 2008 the band released the twelve-song rarities collection The City of Lost Children (named after the French film of the same name). This album featured twelve never before released songs, two of which at least were already well-known, the MTV favorite “Whenever I’m With You” – made famous on the Nick and Jessica Simpson reality TV show, and the September 11th tribute song “Rebuild America”.

The City of Lost Children by Ed Hale and the Transcendence album cover
The City of Lost Children by Ed Hale and the Transcendence

Songs by Ed Hale and The Transcendence can be heard on a variety of television shows on HBO, SHOWTIME, SYFY, VH1, MTV, NBC, FOX, ABC, CBS and in numerous films. They are also well known for their electrifying live performances due to the group possessing some of the most popular and respected musicians from the Miami, New York and Los Angeles music scenes.

Ed Hale and Transcendence live in concert
Guitarist Fernando Perdomo, drummer Bill Sommer, singer Ed Hale and bassist Roger Houdaille live in concert. San Diego, CA

Ed Hale has also become increasingly well-known for his frank and sometimes outlandish brand of social and political activism — showing up at anti-war rallies either sporting his trademark FUCK WAR t-shirt or dressed up like a United States Army General who walks around carrying a United States flag with the words “World We’re Sorry” painted on it. Hale has been actively engaged in social and political activism, marches, protests and demonstrations around the country for a variety of different causes, especially human rights and peace and justice.

Ed Hale at anti-war rally in Washington DC
Ed Hale at anti-war rally in Washington DC
Ed Hale as The General with American flag and guitar protests Iraq War
Ed Hale as The General with American flag and guitar protests American Imperialism

 

Ed Hale – “White House Jihad” – The Music Video

  In 2008 Civilian Diplomat was added to his resume’ as his newest title. Hale attended a 15 day Peace Delegation to the country of Iran where he and 11 other Americans, including Rolling Stone contributing editor Robert Dreyfuss and writer Larry Beinhart — best known for his books-turned-movies Wag the Dog and Salvation Boulevard– were hand-picked to fly around the country to meet with leading government officials including former President Mohammad Khatami and other leading political and religious clerics and Ayatollahs to discuss ways to improve US/Iranian relations and increase peace between the two countries.

Ed Hale at American Peace Delegation to Iran with President Khatami
Ed Hale on American Peace Delegation to Iran with President Khatami

The film department at Siena College is currently creating a one hour documentary about Hale’s trip, which he took extensive footage of while there.

A few months later Hale appeared at the 2008 United Nations General Assembly Meeting in New York City to attend a private conference with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and leading figures of the US peace movement.

Ed Hale and Iran President meeting at United Nations General Assembly
Ed Hale and Iran President meeting at United Nations General Assembly

In 2013 Hale participated in a similar two week peace delegation, pilgrimage and fact-finding tour of Israel/Palestine. And in the following year he toured the country of Pakistan to film a TV documentary focusing on two American-owned schools for girls started there.

Ed Hale at the Dome of the Rock Israel
Ed Hale at the Dome of the Rock in Israel

Actively involved in volunteer work when time affords, in 2007 Hale travelled to a remote village in the center of Ghana on the West Coast of Africa to build houses for the people there with Habitat for Humanity. Hale filmed the entire trip and created a documentary about the experience called Going to Ghana, which can be viewed on YouTube, as part of his Transcendent Television series. He has also taken similar trips to the city of Cartagena in Colombia, South America for the same purpose, home and community building, with the United Methodist Church’s UMCOR.

Ed Hale and children in Ghana, Africa
Ed Hale and children in Ghana, Africa

Besides music and activism, Hale’s other passion of course is writing. Known for the unyielding frankness and personal nature of his online journals, he has posted daily entries to his online blog, the Transcendence Diaries, under the pseudonym Fishy and Tobias Guess for the last 19 years. The “Diaries” feature more than ten-thousand pages uploaded since its inception in early 2001. He is also the author of the award-winning screenplay for the road-movie The Tribe Moves to London; and just completed three books: a pop-culture exploration of contemporary sociology entitled We Are the Revolution: Life in the Age of Personal Expression, Bouncing Back When Flat and The Casanova Diaries, whose title probably speaks more about its subject matter than the now married Hale may be comfortable with.

Domestically Hale made two trips to the post-Katrina Gulf Coast helping to rebuild homes in 2006, and locally he works with the New York Mission Society volunteering with underprivileged children from the Bronx and Harlem. He also volunteers with a local Homeless Shelter, a Food Bank, Covenant House, Big Brothers & Sisters, and is a certified Red Cross Disaster Relief volunteer.

Two of Hale’s newest charity projects include the non-profit website www.TuneInTurnOnHelpOut.org which funnels attention, awareness, and monies to some of his favorite notable causes and charities; and www.PeaceWithIran.org, a website that attempts to show a different side of the people and culture of Iran by acting as a vehicle for enlightened journalists and alternative press coverage of Iran. The charity also attempts to expose more Westerners to Iranian culture — similar to what Hale did to promote the music and culture of Brasil during the early 2000’s when he made several trips there to learn to speak Portuguese and play Bossa Nova. On his Rise and Shine album he recorded several songs in Portuguese and later toured there.

Hale is a member of NARAS (The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences), the performing rights organization ASCAP, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, the International Avatar Network, Amnesty International, International Rescue Coalition, the ACLU, United For Peace and Justice, the ANSWER Coalition, Environmental Defense Fund, Smartmeme, Greenpeace, MoveOn.org, Save the Children, Easter Seals, No Labels and the Christian Children’s Fund.

FAST FACTS AND TRIVIA

Ed Hale is the singer/guitarist in the rock group Ed Hale and The Transcendence along with Fernando Perdomo (Dreaming in Stereo) – guitar, Roger Houdaille (Ex Norwegian) – bass, Allan Gabay – keyboards, Bill Sommer- drums, founding members Jon Rose – (Jon Secada, Billy Elliot) piano and keyboards, and Ricardo Mazzi (Tereso, The Tremends) – drums. Other Miami notables who record and perform in the group include Derek Cintron (DC3) – drums, Karen Feldner (Trophy Wife) – background vocals, Matthew Sabatella (Ballad of America) – harmony vocals, Zach Ziskin (Passion Seeds) – guitar, background vocals, special effects, Greg Byers (Davina and the Vagabonds) – cello. The band formed in 2000 and has released twelve albums to date, along with four Ed Hale solo albums.

Half of the songs on Hale’s album Ballad On Third Avenue were co-written with young newcomer Tyler Bejoian, notable because Bejoian was fifteen years old at the time the two co-wrote many of the songs. The two started collaborating when Bejoian was twelve years of age; their first publicly released song was the controversial Iraq War protest song “White House Jihad” which can be seen on YouTube. Hale and Bejoian met while they lived in the same apartment building in Manhattan. Hale took the younger Bejoian under his wing as a tutor and older brother and the two often got together to talk music, art, politics, film, and literature. Hale often turns to Bejoian, who has become a gifted poet and recording artist in his own right since, for lyrics and collaborates with him on a regular basis. Bejoian is now often listed in the credits as the lyricist for many of Hale’s songs on his newer albums.

The song “Caetano” from the Nothing Is Cohesive album Hale wrote as a tribute to the “Tropicalismo”-era Brazilian superstar-singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. Hale met with Veloso backstage at a concert event in Miami Beach and presented the musical icon with a personally signed copy of the song. Hale has stated that Caetano Veloso is one of his biggest musical influences and one of the reasons he lived in Brasil to learn to play Bossa Nova and speak Portuguese.

Music came naturally to Hale at an early age, and perhaps for good reason his family says in many archived interviews, stating that “it’s in his blood”. He is the nephew of the famous producer, arranger, and musical conductor Antonio Morelli, conductor and orchestra leader for the Sands Hotel’s infamous Copa Room during the “Rat Pack” years of the fifties through the seventies for twenty-five years. Morelli appears on more than three-hundred recorded albums by artists like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, and Dean Martin as an producer, arranger, band leader, or musical conductor. His former home is now a registered Historical Landmark in the State of Nevada, the Antonio Morelli House.

Music may have come naturally to Hale who started playing piano at age four inspired by seeing the film Sound of Music for the first time, but one newspaper article claims that Hale got his start in music when his mother spoke with a psychic who suggested that her troubled son was very creative and recommended that she buy him a guitar in order to give him a creative outlet and keep him out of trouble. Other articles recall the same story and corroborate the “troubled youth” history reporting that Hale was expelled from school for the first time in the first grade (a rare feat if ever there was one), and continued to be expelled throughout his school career having to attend three different high schools in the same town in order to graduate – including a year at a military school. Hale never graduated.

Ed Hale’s first real band, post the EDDIE album period, Broken Spectacles – formed with childhood friend (now popular Americana singer) Matthew Sabatella – got their name from the cover of the Yoko Ono album Season of Glass, which featured a photo of the shattered and blood-stained glasses of slain Beatle’s singer John Lennon.

Though Broken Spectacles never became the household name that they desired to be, they did achieve a national buzz in the college radio circuit and especially in the music industry itself. The band’s debut album was engineered and produced by famed producer Brendan O’Brien (Black Crowes, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen). A failed attempt by legendary drummer Jerry Marotta (Peter Gabriel, Elvis Costello, Hall and Oates) to produce the band’s second album produced mixed results and was never completed, though Hale has stated it was one of the most important experiences in his musical career. “I think we learned more about making music, about making good music, about what good music is, in those few months working with Jerry Marotta than in all the years before or since. His knowledge of music and how to make it actually sound good and unique and different was just way beyond what we were capable of at that time as players. His influence has been huge on me and how I look at music. He was the first guy I ever met and worked with in person who really lives in that other world where real artists live. Just totally transcendent beyond all the talk and bullshit of most people in the business,” Hale said about working with the famous drummer.

Ed Hale released his first album, Eddie, at the age of 17 on the Alarming Talent record label. He was discovered while still in school by music critic-historian and talent agent Murray Silver who wrote the book Great Balls of Fire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story. Silver produced Hale’s first album entitled EDDIE. The 17 year old Hale’s first professional live concert performance was opening for the bands REM, The Georgia Satellites and Swinging Richards at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia.

It was after this period as a solo artist that Hale formed the group Broken Spectacles, wanting to be more than just a “pop singer and be in a real rock band”. The band was together for six years. After the breakup of Broken Spectacles, Hale toured the east coast as a solo artist doing pick up gigs at coffee houses eventually landing in New York City. While there he recorded 12 demos for SONY Records which were never released. Ten of those demos were eventually remixed and digitally remastered and released on the Acoustic In New York album in 2000. Several of the songs from that disc have since been reworked and recorded on future albums by Hale’s group Transcendence, notably “Paris” and “Bored”.

The original band name for TRANSCENDENCE was Ed Hale and The Troubadours of Transcendence. The group originally had eleven members and was meant to create what Hale was then calling “planet music” – the style that can be heard on the band’s debut album Rise and Shine. Hale and drummer Ricardo Mazzi are the only two original members still in the band today. The name was shortened to Ed Hale and Transcendence for the band’s debut album Rise and Shine released in 2002, and eventually shortened to simply Transcendence by the band’s second album Sleep With You.

Hale is a prolific writer, as his Transcendence Diaries illustrate, though strangely guarded about it. He is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles in a variety of fields both fiction and non-fiction, in addition to his long-running blog, The Transcendence Diaries. It’s been said that he’s been working on twenty-two different books for the last twenty years but he’s never released one, choosing instead to constantly rework them or shelve them entirely for other pursuits. Hale has claimed more than once that he feels severely insecure about his abilities as a writer.

It’s no secret that he speaks six languages and is a serial entrepreneur who has owned numerous companies over the last fifteen years in a variety of industries from multi-media to health and anti-aging to the music business to apparel.

The nickname ˜the Ambassador” was given to Ed Hale by long-time friend and Transcendence drummer Ricardo Mazzi due to Hale’s love of travel, World Music and his love of learning new languages. He speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Hebrew and Farsi, and is currently learning Latin and American Sign Language. Hale also sings in a variety of languages on his albums — which adds a multi-cultural approach to creating his art that helped first garner his new band Transcendence public attention. Hale attests that it also helps him in his travels as a volunteer, activist, and Civilian Diplomat.

Outspoken social and political activism may also be something that came to Hale naturally. He is the nephew of Eleanor Cutri Smeal (Born 1939) who is considered one of the leading feminists in the United States of the 20th century. She was the only woman to serve as president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) two separate times, once from 1977 to 1982 and again from 1985 to 1987. She was also president of the Feminist Majority Foundation and continued to organize, publicize and promote feminist issues well into the 1990s. A feminist activist, political analyst, lobbyist, and grassroots organizer, Smeal has appeared frequently on television and radio and testified before Congress on women’s issues over the last fifty years, and has organized numerous events around the world and given speeches on the concepts of feminism, equality, and human rights as they pertain to people in and outside of the United States.

Unbeknown to most fans of his music, alongside his music career and activism, Ed Hale is also an ambitious entrepreneur and businessman who at times comes across as passionate about business and innovation as he does his art. Over the years he has founded numerous multi-million dollar companies in his spare time including a recording studio, The Garden of Eden health food stores, which he sold to the GNC Corporation in his mid-twenties, and the international vitamin manufacturing company Ageless Foundation Laboratories which he sold to publicly-traded Naturade Inc in 2005. Obsessed with anti-aging science he developed the UltraMax-HGH line of products which can be found in health food stores all over America today and fourteen other countries. He also has his hands in real estate investment in The Hale Daniel Corporation, founded and presides over the multi-media company Transcendent Media Group and the record company Dying Van Gogh Records that is home to artists of various musical styles from rock to Americana to hip hop.

He’s been filming and producing the reality show Transcendent Television over the last ten years. Hale refers to his various forays into business as “a hobby and fun way to express his creativity.”

He also owns a consulting company called Optum Consulting, a New York based business consulting firm with team-consultants in different cities all over the world that specializes in corporate and product branding, advertising and marketing. The firm helps start-ups and entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies optimize their businesses, helps them run smoother and more efficiently, and bring new products to market.

Hale is a big supporter and fan of Tony Robbins and credits his courses with much of his success through the years.

He has also taken all of “The Avatar Courses” facilitated by Star’s Edge International numerous times since 1994 and often speaks and writes about his experiences with them positively, along with consciousness expansion and exploration. Hale has remarked in the past that “People are always asking me if Avatar is a cult. But I don’t think that really gets to the heart of the matter. I’m always like ‘I don’t know… Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Isn’t your local religion a cult? But you still dig it, right? I mean, if you’re religious. That doesn’t stop you…. And Avatar has nothing to do with religion. All I know is that it works for me. And that can’t be a bad thing.”

Though he does not speak about it often, but writes of it in his Diaries, Hale, who grew up Catholic and then became an outspoken atheist and agnostic for years, is now a Methodist and a member of the United Methodist Church. He claims to have had several “super-natural spiritual experiences that brought him back to God after years of not wanting anything to do with organized religion”. “It isn’t something I personally had a lot to do with honestly. I would have preferred to have found God through a slightly cooler scene like Hinduism or Buddhism, you know, something with a bit more flash….  But for whatever reason, this Divine Force just made it very clear to me that It wanted me in this particular community at that time….To end up Christian after everything we know about it…. the irony is laughable. In a way it feels like a rip-off. To go through all that searching and land back at square one. It’s a trip, I admit. I’ve heard it said that you don’t find God, God finds you. And He/She/It did,” Hale said in an interview about his experience. “After some of the things I experienced, mind blowing things really, experiences that you take hallucinogens to have…. but all this was straight…. no tripping… I decided it was better to stop denying the existence of The Divine because of my dislike of organized religion and instead explore these other realms and dimensions.”

In 2010 Ed Hale converted to Islam and took the Muslim name of Haafez in order to marry his wife, Nahal Mishel-Ghashghai, in a proper Persian ceremony, and she converted to Christianity in order to marry Hale in a traditional Christian ceremony. “I don’t see it as that big a deal,” said Hale at the time. “If anything it just shows that true love transcends everything, including what society calls religion. It’s semantics. We both believe in a ‘divine force’ and we both believe in love. So we did what we had to legally to avoid any hassles.”

Hale has had his own YouTube channel called TranscendentTV since 2006 where he often videoblogs or posts new songs before they are professionally recorded and released to the public. In 2006 Hale posted ninety-six different videoblogs to YouTube as an experiment to explore what some the most popular subjects in Western Culture were. His conclusion: “for better or worse, sex and politics, or anything controversial. That’s what seems to get people off or get their attention.”

Ed Hale is half English and half Italian. He was estranged from his biological father since the age of three and was raised, along with his younger brother, by his mother, but reconnected with his father for a brief time when he was 28 years old.

On his mother’s side, Hale is a descendant of the 17th century Italian Engineer and Mathematician Niccolo Tartaglia – who developed the solution for algebraic cubic equations and is best known for his books on applied mathematics Della Nova Scientia and General Trattato di Numeri et Misure.

Ed Hale is married. He and his wife split their time between their homes in New York, NY and Seattle, WA.

DISCOGRAPHY: THE EDDIE ALBUM (Ed Hale solo)- 1999 ACOUSTIC IN NEW YORK (Ed Hale solo) – 2000 RISE AND SHINE – January 2002 SLEEP WITH YOU – October 2003 NOTHING IS COHESIVE – October 2004 CITY OF LOST CHILDREN – October 2006 BALLAD ON THIRD AVENUE (Ed Hale solo) – 2009 ALL YOUR HEROES BECOME VILLAINS – November 2011 THE GREAT MISTAKE – November 2012 SO FOR REAL – August 2018 UPCOMING BORN TO LOSE – 2019 ANOTHER DAY IN THE APOCALYPSE – 2019 WELCOME TO THE REST OF THE WORLD – 2019 L’INTRIGUE DE FEMME / FINDING FRANCESCA — 2020

Last update: June 2019

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