David Mead – Wherever You Are

Wherever You Are was supposed to be David Mead’s third album for RCA. In late 2002, he and his bandmates, Whynot Jansveld and Ethan Eubanks, laid down songs with producer Stephen Hague; Tchad Blake mixed the tracks. The album was ready to go. Everyone was happy.

Then RCA merged with another label, Mead was dropped, and the album disappeared into the whirlpool of corporate legal entanglements. Mead returned to Nashville and wrote most of his 2004 indie-label debut, Indiana. Life went on, as it will.

The release, on this abbreviated disc, of six songs from Wherever You Are feels like seeing someone you know reasonably well but don’t immediately recognize because of a different haircut. After the amiably earnest quietude of Indiana, the grinning sparkle of “Hold On” and “Only A Dream” doesn’t quite make sense, at first.

Yet Mead’s voice, a very pretty thing reminiscent of Squeeze’s Glen Tilbrook, stands out here as it did on Indiana. Hague’s elaborately rich production — he’s better known for his work with the Pet Shop Boys and New Order — actually suits that open attractiveness, while Blake’s mix clarifies each slightly precious element of the music.

The result, as easy to listen to as Maroon 5 but far more literate and thoughtful, also suits Mead better than his recent tendency toward becoming a second-string Jack Johnson. Geographically, Wherever You Are is much more vague than Indiana, but in every other way it seems, for Mead, to be more like home.