A short phone interview just prior to the WHEREVER YOU ARE tour.

About a year ago you had just started touring for Indiana. As you're about to start another tour very soon, how would you reflect on the past year?

Fondly! I think there was something about Indiana that was a little more friendly than some of my other records and I think it was a warmer invitation to a lot of people. Touring-wise, it was a lot easier to pull that record off - either solo or with one or two musicians, which is usually the way I have to do it. It got a lot of press in places I hadn't been before, like No Depression and some of the more singer-songwriter things. There's a community that exists around those outlets that probably didn't care when I was presented in my major label "wannabe king of the world" facade or whatever. Indiana leveled the playing field on a lot of levels. I thought it was a really good step forward. You know, I would have loved if the record sold 100,000 more copies than it did, but at the same time, living in real world, I was happy with the result.

Wherever You Are represents your farewell to New York, whereas Indiana represents you settling down in Nashville. Now that you're promoting Wherever You Are, how does it feel to go back and revisit that period of time?

It's interesting because now I’m much more excited about everything as a result of Indiana and because of some of the headway that’s been made with touring, MySpace and other stuff. Since getting off a major label and a major indie, I feel a lot more in control of my career; it's something that I devote a large part of every day to. My attitude towards that was a lot more disinterested when all of the Wherever You Are material came about. Some of the dislocated feeling of that record is definitely the result of living in this bubble where - this probably sounds odd - it didn't feel like I had the ability to have as much direct effect on what was going on around me. It was a pretty unfocused time in my life; I'm surprised that record actually sounds as good as it does, given the circumstances. I don't know - this really sounds cliché and dumb - it's sort of like going back to New York now, it's about something completely different than it was when I actually lived there. I can go out and take advantage of it a lot more. In a similar way, these songs are so old in some respects that I have to approach them from a new perspective and that's a lot more exciting than I thought it would be.

November of 2001: you started to debut some new songs at the end of the Mine And Yours tour. Out of the four songs debuted around this time, "Hold On" was the only song that made it to the recording sessions. Would you say this song is the centerpiece of the album?

I think that one could be the centerpiece of the record; that's one of those questions that is sort of difficult to answer with so much time gone by. I know that was the one that really got it all going and into focus a little bit. I had that one kicking around for a while and I actually finished it on September 12th or 13th or something, right after 9/11. It just had this resonance then. Working through that song provided the oomph towards finishing the rest of the album. So I don't know whether it's the centerpiece or not. In this new context of the mini-album "Wherever You Are" kind of feels more like the centerpiece to me. I feel really hands-off with it in a lot of ways; it's such a weird process of getting this batch of music out there. I am a lot more open to interpretation than usual because I don't always know what I think of it myself.

You debuted most of the songs that would make up the Wherever You Are sessions during two shows in New York with Ethan and WhyNot in August 2002. How did you feel about them at the time and how were they received?

I think they were received pretty well; I remember one show was totally weighted with all of our friends anyway so we would have really had to screw it up to make it appear that nobody liked the stuff. It was so long ago it's hard to remember exactly how I felt about it. I remember thinking, for example, this one song called "Attitude" was a hit; I thought that was a big deal - and who knows, maybe it still is. It felt like something kind of happened along the way of the recording of that where it fell by the wayside, which is why doing preproduction and then trying stuff out like that in a more intense microscopic environment is usually beneficial.

Wherever You Are was the original home for Indiana staples "Beauty" and "Oneplusone". What were these original versions like and will they ever see the light of day?

Actually, those would be good candidates for MP3's on the site at some point if people are still interested. I think that version of "Oneplusone" is killer...

It is; I prefer it to the version on Indiana. Definitely superior.

Yeah, the scope of Indiana to me - the more limited instrumental scope - didn't allow “Oneplusone” to be as fully realized as it was in the Wherever You Are context. "Beauty" - that version is a little more epic; it's driven by programming a little bit more with the live acoustic drums. It's just a lot bigger...

Yeah, a little more experimental.

Yeah, I guess so. Experimental in David Mead's world, I don't know about anybody else's... [laughter]

Hey, you got some weird sounds in there.

Yeah, we threw in a few...

Your wife Natalie has once again done the cover art - is that a new piece or was it intended to be the cover at some earlier point?

That's a new piece commissioned for the EP. I think my original idea for the cover - at least back when I knew RCA was going to pay for it - I had come up with a plan to... it's pretty difficult to describe, but it was all transparent and all of the artwork was made up of words which were just printed directly onto the CD jewel case and the CD itself so that it all came together as this multilayered thing. It would still be really cool to pull off but it would be really expensive as well. That's the only original idea I can remember for it.

During the 2003 tour, you sold shirts with a drawing Natalie made of a house, was that ever intended to be part of the artwork?

No, not really, although we did use that for a five-song promo around that time.

Stylistically, conceptually and emotionally, how does the new condensed version of Wherever You Are compare to the original version?

I felt like the original version as a whole piece of work was a little more dysfunctional than most stuff that I had done before and have done since. It had this emotional core to it that I tried to preserve when I selected what went on the EP; I just wanted to get that central feeling in it. There were some super pop songs on the original full length that - they're not bad songs in and of themselves - I just feel like presenting them in the whole might have weakened the rest because, even though they were fine on their own, they just didn't have the resonance of the ones that ended up on the EP. I'm hoping that I succeeded in chipping away at the diamond so to speak - kind of getting rid of what felt superfluous. It's hard to say because, for example, there's nothing wrong with "Little Sister"; it might have been the best opportunity I ever had at a radio single. Maybe someone will hear it in fifteen years and say "what an idiot, why didn't he put this out there?" But in the context of everything else, it kind of felt a little... I don't know. The fact that I actually considered making it into a duet with Michelle Branch kind of illustrates the point that it was a pretty direct and unapologetic attempt at getting some radio airplay. I don't have a problem with unapologetic attempts to do that, but taking that song and putting it next to "Astronaut" might have endangered the believability of the entire thing. I could have been wrong, but that's what I was thinking.