Action, Jackson

"There's no way I would've done a reunion where we just went out on tour and played old songs," Jackson says, taking a break from rehearsals days before the band begins a world tour in New Orleans on March 11. "I mean, it would've been so cheesy. I didn't really just want it to be a tasteless exercise in nostalgia. I figured, well, if we reunite this band, there's going to be an element of nostalgia, no matter what, so let's just enjoy that, let's have fun with it. But let's just keep it as an element in something new and not the main course. It's kind of like a side salad of nostalgia."

Jackson refuses to accept his interrogator's theory that this reunion feels in a way organic, something hinted at in recent works that have steered him back toward the beginning. Indeed, he bristles at the notion.

"It's not really that conscious," he says. "It may be that things have been leading in this direction, but I wasn't aware of it. I think that a lot of time, you're working with stuff that...To me, it's mysterious. It comes from the unconscious mind, I guess. I think most artists work in an intuitive way. I don't think we really think, 'Ah, I did that, so next I should do this because that's the logical progression.' I think that's a critic's way of thinking or someone who's assessing it from outside or with hindsight and with things like that."

So, there's no feeling of completing a circle?

"No, I don't really," he says, with proper annoyance at a stupid question. "Because I'm not dead yet."

But the hints have been there nonetheless, the bread crumbs that lead to Volume 4. Consider: In 1999, Jackson published A Cure for Gravity, an eloquent autobiography in which he reviewed, in the third person, Look Sharp! and found it reeking of 1978. "There is no style," he wrote of the album dotted with the influences of jazz and reggae and Latin music and punk and ska and half-buried homages to Steely Dan and Graham Parker. He heard "a guy with eclectic tastes," a man with a strained voice and limited range--but someone also "quite distinctive" nonetheless. Jackson had never before gone back to listen to his old albums--"they're just sort of encoded in my DNA or something," he says today, "by which I mean I don't have to listen to [them]"-- but pulled out the first one and discovered, perhaps to his surprise, he kind of liked it.

A year later, he released two albums that suggested a man turning the car back around. One was Night and Day II, a sort of sequel to the album that sold more than any of his career and spawned the biggest hits he would ever have; it even references "Steppin' Out" as the final song, "Stay," fades out into that familiar piano twinkle. The other disc was Summer in the City, a live album cut with Maby and drummer Gary Burke, on which Jackson mixed old and new and borrowed (from Duke Ellington, Fagen-Becker, Lennon-McCartney...and John Sebastian). On that record, he conjured a sound--that of the small combo with a big grin--strikingly familiar and warmly comforting for the JJ fan who'd fallen out in 1986, when he conjured up the Will Power to go classical; or in 1991, when he extended the peace offering Laughter & Lust; or in 1994 or '97 or 2000, when he resisted pop's advance and started sleeping with a baton.

Nothing in life is inevitable, but Volume 4, with its odes to glam-rock days long since faded and its echoes of reggae and rock and its after-hours piano strikes, at least sounds logical. Jackson's been working his way back to rock, and the audience, for years. It's just been a slow progression, a crawl back after the psychic injury of 1991, when he was burned out and disinterested in listening to music, much less making it.

"In the early '90s I just got really exhausted and burned out and took some time off and had writer's block and got depressed and all kinds of things," he says. "Had generally a rough time of it for a while. And ['94's] Night Music was kind of a way back in. It was the only thing I was capable of doing at that time, as I see it. Other people have seen it differently, you know, because that album really got slagged off. But, you know, for me, the way I saw it was a very gentle and sort of quiet, humble record, which was all I really felt like doing at the time. It was either that or nothing. I had to gradually find my way back. I really lost it for a while, and I had to sort of gradually find my way back into it by trying to reconnect with the music that I really loved and why I was doing this and almost going back to when I first started, when I was 12, 13, 14 years old."