Though Clay Aiken [ tickets ]'s upcoming December concerts will have a holiday theme, the singer plans to get back on the road next year to support his third album, "A Thousand Different Ways," which debuted at No. 2 on The Billboard 200 album chart after selling 205,000 copies during its first week in stores.

It was Aiken's third consecutive debut inside the Top 5: his debut, "Measure of a Man," entered at No. 1 and "Merry Christmas With Love" debuted at No. 4.

"A Thousand Different Ways" combines 10 cover versions of songs from the '70s, '80s and '90s with four new songs--though that wasn't the original plan, Aiken said in an e-mail interview.

"It wasn't our intention to do it this way," he explained. "But we started noticing that so many of the greatest songs we were finding were cover songs. Clive [Davis] made the suggestion and thought it would be a great idea to remake the greatest love songs of all time. When Clive Davis has an idea, you have to assume it's going to be great. So we listened to him and gave it a shot."

The album includes covers of Richard Marx's "Right Here Waiting," Paul Young's "Every Time You Go Away" and Mr. Mister's "Broken Wings." Choosing the songs was a collaborative effort between him, Davis and executive producer Jaymes Foster.

"Clive chose songs; I chose songs; Jaymes chose songs," Aiken said. "Then, from our three lists, we collaborated on the best picks. We really found that we had a great deal of matches on all three lists. Not only did we want to pick songs that were excellent copyrights and stellar songs, we also made sure that each song really matched me vocally and stylistically. I mean, 'I'm Too Sexy' was a big hit ... but seriously ... me singing it wouldn't really fit!"

As it turns out, the original artists and songwriters seem complimentary of Aiken's renditions of their songs.

"A number of the song writers have been pleased with what we came up with," he said. "Diane Warren is usually quite picky about the way her songs are performed and she had only great things to say about 'Because You Loved Me' and 'When I See You Smile.' Richard Page [of Mr. Mister] was very complimentary of 'Broken Wings.' He actually said that he never really thought he would be able to appreciate a cover of one of his songs, but that he was impressed with what we did. Bryan Adams was complimentary as well."

For "Broken Wings," Aiken includes an original poem spoken by Erin Taylor. He said he did so because he wanted "to do something ethereal with one of the songs."

"'Broken Wings' lent itself to that type of production more than anything else. I was going to simply have a friend of mine read the lyrics to the song in the background. But she was in the studio with us while we were recording and came up with this amazing poem that really related the message of the song in a whole new way, so we decided to use it."

Aiken launches his latest holiday tour Dec. 1 in Waukegan, IL. This year, local orchestras will begin the festivities, with Aiken joining them for a set of holiday songs, some of which are found on his CD "Merry Christmas With Love."