*Joe Jackson releases his first studio album for five years, Rain, in late January. Here's a sneak preview, plus a few words from the man himself...*From new wave firebrand to globe-hopping metropolitan renaissance man, Jackson's career path has seen him stop off at several intriguing points. Jump jive big band projects, modern film noir soundtracks, fiction writing, idiosyncratic theatre commissions and sideman duties for (eek!) William Shatner may not have resulted in the high profile afforded by hits like It's Different For Girls or Steppin' Out, but Rain is perhaps his most commercially appealing work for some time. If there has to be a link to what's gone before, the urban sophistication and adult lyrical concerns are probably closest to 1981's Night And Day. Jackson's piano is at the forefront (there's not a single note of guitar anywhere on the album, the few solos courtesy of Graham Maby's bass), gracing a delicate suite of unconnected songs that suggest an equal fondness for Steely Dan and Duke Ellington. Too Tough returns once again to the old themes of romantic doubt, underscored by a motif borrowed from Leiber & Stoller's On Broadway, while Rush Across The Road could be read as a belated sequel to his breakthrough hit Is She Really Going Out With Him?, the protagonist a wiser and less frustrated man. Citizen Sane is the closest Jackson gets to rocking out, but it's a far cry from the youthful arrogance of I'm The Man. He's still as caustic and as witty as ever, but the social commentary is couched in a moodswing complexity/simplicity that Jimmy Webb or Burt Bacharach would be proud of.Joe Jackson talks to Mogger Terry Staunton:*Why the gap of nearly five years since your last studio release?*I wasn't in any great hurry to do another album, I'm not the workaholic I used to be. I believe more in quality than quantity now, and I sort of made a promise to myself that I wouldn't make another record until I had 10 or 12 songs that were the absolute best I could do. I did too much in the early days, really, I should have taken a bit more time over things and concentrated on getting better.*The album was recorded in Berlin, where you now live. What prompted the move?*I couldn't take London any more, or England. I think it's turning into a mean-spirited nanny state. I've visited friends in Berlin over the years, and I was attracted to the relative freedom of the place, the relaxed atmosphere. It may well change in the future, it could end up getting more like London, but I don't really want to go down that line of thought. It tends to come across as me being a miserable bastard, as opposed to someone who's got a few things to be legitimately pissed off with.*Do you think your humour is sometimes overlooked or misunderstood? You're not really the grumpy-old-man type, are you?*Well, I'm 52 now, but I was just as grumpy at 22! I think the grumpiness thing is the biggest misconception people have of me. Over and over again, people seem to miss the humour in what I do.*What's next for you after this album?*I've been working on a piece for theatre, which will hopefully be staged some time in 2008, about Bram Stoker. The whole Dracula myth has been told and retold so many times, but no one's ever really taken a look at Stoker's own life.*A version of this article appears in the UK music magazine Record Collector, out in late January*