A good friend of ours recently discovered eleven rolls of undeveloped film in a cluttered drawer in his kitchen. Upon having them developed, he was surprised to find that the pictures dated back ten years. He described the surreal sensation of seeing old details of his life from a new perspective, stills from a movie he thought had ended a long time ago.

The songs on Wherever You Are are taken from a full-length album that was recorded in late 2002. It documented the end of a long love affair I had with New York City and was slated to be my third release with the RCA Record label. Stephen Hague (New Order, Blur, Pet Shop Boys) agreed to the task of molding a large group of songs into a finished product that everyone could be excited about. He brought my band mates (Whynot Jansveld, Ethan Eubanks) and I up to Woodstock, NY, for what we hoped would be a pressure-free environment to create a sparkling gem of an album. We later relocated to Real World Studios outside of Bath, England, where Tchad Blake (Neil Finn, Los Lobos, Sheryl Crow) mixed most of the tracks.

Two months later, as the final mixes were being printed in London, everyone, RCA included, was ecstatic about the finished product. We had triumphed against adversity and alcohol, climbed new artistic heights and, seemingly, saved the day by the skin of our teeth.

Sadly, things did not turn out to be quite so simple or heroic. Two weeks after the final mixes were turned in, RCA announced a rather complicated merger with another record label. Massive downsizing ensued, people were fired, hearts were broken and many artists were ‘dropped’, myself being one of them. I sat in my little bungalow in Nashville for a month or two and wrote most of the markedly more introspective and quiet songs that became Indiana, an album that suddenly seemed far more appropriate to my current state of mind. Meanwhile, Wherever You Are sat helplessly collecting dust in the midst of the usual legal settlements that mark the end of a relationship with a large corporation. In 2003 I signed with another record label that was ready and willing to release Indiana, which they did in May of 2004. Wherever temporarily receded into the realm of myth and lost opportunity.

I still love New York, albeit in the way a man might always love a particularly volatile woman that he’ll never be able to stay with. And I still love the songs, these six from those sessions that constitute the core of what the entire album was about. Like most long farewells, the full-length version contained some moments that now seem slightly embarrassing and better left unsaid. I am thankful to be given the opportunity to present you with what I consider to be the heart of the matter. Despite its somewhat murky origins, Wherever You Are now seems a more sparkly thing, full of encouragement and determination. It has become a small testament to my belief that everything does not require closure. Thankfully, we live a circular life, where forgotten snapshots in cluttered drawers appear with reassuring consistency.

DAVID MEAD, APRIL 2005