It’s 2am and you’re sound asleep. You feel someone tugging at you, urging you to get up and get going. Something about a road trip. Your eyes creak open. It’s David Mead? What’s he doing here? No time for questions... Before you know it, you’re riding shotgun in a rental car with Mr. Mead at the helm, careening down the Interstate, windows down, early morning air hitting you like a stingray.

On the stereo is Mead’s new album Indiana, his third officially, and his first for Nettwerk America. The first song, “Nashville,” eases out of the speakers while your ears warm to the sound. Acoustic guitars sparkle in time with the night sky and Mead’s unmistakable tenor is serenely singing something about a “childhood highway” and “crawling home.” As the chorus hits its pleasant walking-horse gait, you realize that you’re leaving New York and “going back to Nashville,” the home of Mead’s youth, and the place where his musical journey began. It’s a song of hope and memory and regret, and it gives you some insight into the motives behind Mead’s return to the Music City after living in Manhattan. But as usual there’s more to the story than what can fit into a four-minute song.

“One of the reasons I left... was a little bit of burnout. I’d been living pretty hard,” Mead explains, draining another cup of coffee. “There’s a real sense there, especially if you’re in the arts or music community, that you should be preserving age 22 or age 23 to infinity. But after three years there I see now that I was missing not growing older, in a way. My friends in Nashville seemed to be taking on adulthood a little more graciously than my friends in New York.”

While Mead recalls his experiences there, the City fades in the rear view mirror. The dotted lines zoom under the headlights, and the second song comes on. “You Might See Him” is a highly emotional and elusive musical riddle that first has you searching for the “him” and who he might be - a neglecting husband, an Alzheimer’s patient, God? - and ends with you wondering who the “you” might be. It’s a powerful song, but unbeknownst to you the most commanding moment on the album is right around the corner.

With the trees whizzing by and the distant swell of an unidentifiable echo sighing from the stereo, the album hits its heart: the astounding anthemic, “Beauty.” On this stripped down, almost completely acoustic album, the centerpiece is, ironically, the only song where Mead breaks out electric guitars. The chorus envelops you, sending the established intimate tone into the stratosphere with a melody so glorious and expansive you might recall the sensation of the first noise that hits your just-popped ears after coming down a mountain. It’s an auditory revelation, and the kind of song that should catapult Mead into a place of prominence.

When “Beauty” climbs to its rapturous resolve, you lean in to the sound of Mead’s voice. Mead’s remarkable vocals have suffered many comparisons before but on this record, you notice that his most obvious talent has become a wholly unique instrument. Like Simon and Garfunkel rolled into one golden throat, Mead’s vocals have the crystalline elasticity and far away grandeur of Garfunkel and the knowing timbre and tragic grace of Simon.

Trying to nail down Mead’s stubbornly diverse sound is decidedly more difficult. A look at his touring partners of the past two years gives a little insight into the makeup of his music. The songs on Indiana have the New York-by-way of London, sophisticated bohemian aesthetic of Joe Jackson, the penchant for poignant balladry of his Canadian counterpart Ron Sexsmith, the power for pure pop melody that permeates Fountains of Wayne and even the organic, acoustic crackle of fellow smooth operator John Mayer. All of these artists recognized something familiar in Mead when choosing him, perhaps a sincere reflection of their own talents, and they were all equally right.

The road gets a little bumpy when you hit the Indiana state line. That is when the reality of life as a touring artist becomes three dimensional, a reality explained by Mead when he deftly deconstructs the myths of the rock star road experience on the album’s title track. “I didn’t want it to be a ‘On a steel horse I ride’ kinda song,” Mead states. “I wanted to talk about what generally does actually happen. I like touring a lot of the time, but sometimes it reminds me a lot more of my dad’s old job. He was a salesman. He would take me on his trips sometimes; and it’s a lot like that. You don’t have time to be getting fucked up or whatever. You’ve got an eight-hour drive and then you do your sound check and you are in charge of everything. It is much more like being a traveling salesman at that point than it is anything approaching being a rock star.”

On your trip through the cinematic song-scapes of Indiana you see how as the days turn into weeks and each gig blurs into the next, you can become acquainted with a place in its most personal form. Cities and states become personalities; familiar faces marked by exit signs instead of smiles, and high rises instead of hairdos. Mead knows much of America on a first name basis, and on Indiana he explores his relationship with many of his more intimate friends from the map. But his knowledge doesn’t end on the edges of the USA; he’s toured Japan, and even more extensively, the UK and Ireland, where he has garnered substantial airplay for several of his previous singles on the UK’s most listened-to stations.

Riding along with Mead you are bound to hit some emotional hills (the effervescent “One Plus One”) and valleys (the ponderous “Only a Girl”) and wander off into seldom-seen places (the tantalizing dreamscape of the timeless Randy Newman-esque “Bucket of Girls”). You will most assuredly take some proverbial left turns, like the one that leads you to the unexpected destination of “New Mexico.” “I keep going back to the word ‘conversational’ with this record. It’s like, if we’re already having this conversation that’s been going along well for like 45 minutes, if I want to make a weird left turn and start talking about, I don’t know, cow teats or something,” Mead says, ”Then we’ve already established the rapport where we can diverge and make sense of it.”

The strains of a late night waltz usher you out of Indiana and back to where your journey began, back to “an island of vagabonds,” a “stop on your way to be free;” back to New York City. “New York songs are always about the Sinatra angle, like, ‘I’m leaving you here and I’m gonna go and make it!’” Mead says of the song “Queensboro Bridge.” “So I thought it was cool to write from the perspective of being left in New York and painting it almost like its own kind of prison. I thought that that would be a little more interesting than your standard take, you know, champagne poppers and odes to 42nd Street.”