Joe Jackson [ tickets ] is more than comfortable comparing his recently released album, "Night and Day II," its 1982 predecessor. The 46-year-old singer-songwriter said, simply, that it’s a vast improvement.

The new album "is more mature, sophisticated, riskier, has more colors, and better lyrics" than "Night and Day." "I'm better now at what I do and a bit more ambitious," Jackson said.

Why did Jackson record a sequel to the New York-influenced "Night and Day?"

"I don't know why I do these things," he said. "It's all very mysterious. It's all some combination of the theme of New York City, because it's kind of hard to exhaust all the possibilities of writing about New York. Also, it's the musical formula, if you want to call it that--the sound of 'Night and Day' is all based on keyboards and percussion."

Both "Night and Day" albums are full of rich characters that are easy to picture. "It's all the real people I've either met, seen, observed, heard about or imagined," he said. "And as such, they're all real. I paint pictures of weird New York characters in a very cartoony style. It's a city filled with weird people, and no matter how strange you think you are, there's always someone stranger than you."

The original "Night and Day" was written when Jackson was just starting to experience New York. For the past 16 years, he has divided his time between the Lower West Side of Manhattan and his hometown of Portsmouth, outside of London. Although he is not a U.S. citizen, Jackson considers himself to "be more British than American, but I'm more a New Yorker than a Londoner. New York is my main base."

Jackson is gearing up for the Nov. 30 launch of his North American "Night and Day 2000/2001" theater tour in West Palm Beach, Fla., which will not feature an opening act. "All the time the opening act is playing, I'm not playing," said. "I want to play. I want to give people lots of music. There's a lot of music to draw from."

Jackson plans to play two-hour shows with a 15-minute intermission, with a set list heavy on selections from both "Night and Day" albums. "We'll mix up the albums with a bunch of earlier stuff," he said. "We'll change the set every night."

While 1997's Heaven & Hell tour featured synthesizers and sequencers, Jackson plans to forgo the electronic enhancements for the upcoming jaunt. He will be backed by a six-piece band consisting of bassist Graham Maby, percussionist Sue Hadjopoulos, drummer Roberto Rodriquez, keyboadrist Andy Ezrin, multi-instrumentalist Allison Cornell and cellist Catherine Bent.

Jackson broke out of the British New Wave of the late '70s and, along with Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, is one of the few solo artist survivors. He has headlined in clubs, theaters and arenas over the course of his career.

"A lot of artists start off as widely overrated, and then as time goes on, they become widely underrated," Jackson said. "In the ‘80s, a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon who were inevitably going to jump off no matter what I did. There was a period of time I had to come to terms with that and not take it personally. Now I feel pretty good about it, and doing a theater tour--which is what I want to do--and to play to people who really want to be there."

After his North American dates this fall, Jackson will tour Europe in January and February before returning to the States for another leg in March and April.