David Mead: Mine And Yours

One of the greatest perils of signing a deal with a major record company lies in labels' practice of working with 10 times as many acts as they promote, leaving a vast majority of their rosters to be cut loose as tax write-offs the moment the first single fails to magically catch fire. The negative result is clear: dashed hopes and dreams, wasted money and time, the glut of music, good and bad, that gets lost to the ages. This is especially sad considering that many musicians take a quantum creative leap forward between albums during their formative period, soaring from tentative mediocrity to outright excellence in a single record. Radiohead and Idlewild did it, and now so does David Mead, whose Mine And Yours leaves his promising but mostly unremarkable 1999 debut, The Luxury Of Time, in the dust. Packed with smooth, ingratiating pop and produced by Fountains Of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger, Mine And Yours shows Mead to be equally adept at slick radio fodder (the title track, "Echoes Of A Heart," "Girl On A Roof") and swooning, falsetto-driven balladry (the gorgeous "No One Left To Blame"). Pleasantly diverting at worst, beguiling at best, it's one of the best singer-songwriter albums in some time, sophisticated and hooky in equal measure. It's extremely fortunate that Mead's label didn't cut him loose after The Luxury Of Time failed to set the world ablaze. With its engaging, mature, cosmopolitan pop, Mine And Yours proves yet again that great music doesn't always spring, fully formed, out of new artists. Think of how many great records are lost to impatience, then be grateful that David Mead got a second chance.