There are artists who achieve success and are satisfied to spend the rest of their careers repeating the formula. And there are those like Eagle-Eye Cherry who seek to come up with something creatively fresh each and every time.

Combining his most mature set of songs to date with the most widescreen production of his career, Cherry's third album, Sub Rosa, finds him expanding the boundaries of his artistry and boldly challenging our preconceptions.

"I'd hesitate to say there's been a master plan," he says. "But you can definitely trace a journey through my records. If there's a theme to Sub Rosa it's asking 'what road are we going down?' It's a cynical world and people don't want to be preached at. But there are a lot of questions that need to be asked right now."

Sub Rosa comes on the back of Eagle-Eye's first real break in five years, following the hectic schedule that engulfed him after his 1998 breakthrough hit, "Save Tonight". The time off gave him the opportunity to take stock personally and to take a look around at the much-changed world in which we now live.

"I got back home in early 2002 and was able to sort through a lot of stuff," he explains. "On the road you live in a bubble and you have to put a lot of things on the back-burner and decide to deal with them later. I needed to take a break and to clear out the closet."

The result is a collection of songs that are still highly personal but are also full of acute observation of the world around us. "Quite a few of the songs like 'Be Like That' and 'How Come' touch on the question of where we're headed," he says. "There's some despair at what's happening in the world right now. But there's optimism in there, too. With a song like 'Don't Give Up', I wanted to send out a message, like "Give Peace A Chance". It's saying 'there's always hope'. You can apply that in different ways. It would be fun to imagine a crowd at a soccer match singing it when their team is losing, for example. "

Sub Rosa is also an album of stories, peopled by interesting characters. "The Strange", for example, was written one day in New York, just sitting in Central Park and people watching. "Skull Tattoo" has a similar inspiration. "People have asked me who the woman is in that song," Eagle-Eye says. "But she was just someone I saw on the street."

Then there is "Twisted Games", in which the first verse is about a child who becomes a pyromaniac and the second verse is about a boy obsessed with guns. "I like the idea of the songwriter as storyteller. On a lot of these songs I've stepped outside myself," he says.