'Her flesh is smooth and supple, and velvet as the night/ Her eyes are shot with diamonds, a mouth full of delight," Mick Jagger sings on the yearning title track from his fourth solo album, Goddess In The Doorway, in stores Tuesday.

Is the Rolling Stones frontman, single again since splitting in 1999 from wife Jerry Hall after 22 years together, talking about anyone in particular?

After all, he had a five-month relationship with model Sophie Dahl, granddaughter of best-selling children's author Roald Dahl, which ended earlier this year, and more recently was linked with the newly single actress Minnie Driver, who broke off her engagement to actor Josh Brolin. (More on that later.)

"Goddess In The Doorway is really representative of love generally -- that one's not about one particular person," the 58-year-old singer says down the line from Los Angeles recently. "Goddess In The Doorway is about the elusive nature of love. It can be such a fleeting thing. You see it there and it's just fluttering and it's gone. And it sort of can be a metaphor for more than just love, or women, or love of women."

But what about another new song called Gun, said to be about Jagger's devastation over Hall divorcing him because of the love child he had with Brazilian model Lucian Morad? Hall and Jagger are now said to be good friends.

"You read that in The Sun newspaper. Only in The Sun newspaper!" Jagger responds good-naturedly, when I bring up the report linking Hall and the song. (And, just to be clear, he's talking about the British tabloid, not The Toronto Sun.)

"No, it wasn't really written about her, you know," Jagger continues. "That was a really strange song. I'm not ... someone (who's) very violent. I mean, I don't really like using guns too much, you know, even for sport. So you come up with these lines and these melodies that go with them and you think, 'Where did that come from? Why do I feel so strongly about that?'

"And so you go, 'Ah, well. I'll just carry on writing it and see where I'm going with that, and then you like the result. And you say, 'Well, that's how I felt that moment. I was angry. That's the way it is.' A lot of times songs are very much of a moment, that you just encapsulate. They come to you, you write them, you feel good that day, or bad that day."

A sample of the Gun lyrics: "You tried to stretch me on the rack/ I saw you laughing when I cracked/ You broke my will, you broke my back/ On the wheel of uncertainty/ Why don't you just get a gun and shoot it through this heart of mine."

Given the subject matter, he also doesn't think Goddess is more personal than any other solo album.

"I don't know. I think it's direct. Personal -- I don't know what that means. I tried to make contact on this record. It's what I wanted to do, without too much clutter, without a lot standing the way, and then trying to make a direct line between the author and the listener."

But since Jagger says in the press notes that his new album is about "love and spirituality," how is he doing on both fronts?

This question makes him burst into laughter.

"It's hard to come up with a sort of one-liner on what the record's about," he says in his posh British accent. "But I mean, it is about love, relationships. But it's not only restricted (to that) and there's quite a lot of observations and there's quite a lot of humour, and the leavening of spirituality, which I think is all part of everybody's makeup."

It also doesn't mean that Jagger's gotten used to the press constantly writing about his love life in his post-Hall phase.

"It's like everyone I have dinner with, I'm having an affair with," he says. "Who was it I met the other day? Minnie Driver! There were like eight of us at dinner and I never met Minnie Driver and she seems charming, but I mean that's the only time I've ever met her. And then I was reading I was having (an affair) because she's just broken up, so that was a natural. But people don't bother to check with anything like that anymore. They just like to speculate in print. We like fact-checking!"

For the record, Jagger is open to meeting someone special. Some day.

"I'm sure I could be in a full-time relationship but I'm not at the moment. I don't think that being in a full-time relationship is necessarily for everybody all of the time. It's not necessarily some state of grace that you're in, you know, but I think it's great and who knows what will happen in the future?"

In the meantime, Goddess is Jagger's first solo album since 1993's Wandering Spirit. He says the reason for releasing his own album as opposed to a Rolling Stones record was simple.

"It's (been) a while," Jagger says. "And really, I'd done a very long project on (the Rolling Stones' 1997 album) Bridges To Babylon. I was on the road for ages with that, and when I came off the road, I thought, 'Well, the next studio thing I want to do, I want to do on my own.' "

Sort of.

Among those making guest appearances on Goddess are Bono, Pete Townshend, Lenny Kravitz, Wyclef Jean, Aerosmith's Joe Perry and Matchbox Twenty's Rob Thomas. His daughters, Elizabeth and Georgia May Jagger, also sing backup vocals on the album-ending song Brand New Set Of Rules.

"They love to be in the room," Jagger says of his girls. "And they come in the recording studio and they wander in, 'cause I did a lot in my house, and they say, 'Hey, I want to sing on that, Dad!' 'Okay, here's the mic!' They're good at it. They're great fun. They love music and they love doing it."

The same could be said of Jagger and his A-list guests. Their presence seems to have given Jagger a boost in the energy department on his new album, although he maintains most of the 12 songs were done well before he got to the collaborating part.

"A lot of this stuff, the majority of it all, was done with myself and a friend of mine called Matt Clifford (the former Stones keyboardist). And yes, we did have a lot of collaborators and some of them came in and upped the energy even more from what it was on completed tracks, like Pete Townshend (Joy, Gun) and Bono (Joy), and I think they really helped. They give it variety and energy, as you say. The tune I did with Lenny Kravitz (God Gave Me Everything) was a collaboration. I was working on songs also with Rob Thomas (Visions Of Paradise). So you know you get a different melodic feel, you just get a different sensibility than you would just on your own."

As for how it's different than a Stones album -- Jagger confirmed in a Sun article published Oct. 23 that the band would be touring next year in celebration of their 40th anniversary -- the singer says there's not as much pressure.

"It's a different process 'cause it's just me playing the guitar, to start with, and no one else," he says. "I mean, the Rolling Stones has its own persona, a very long-lived one, and it has its own expectations from listeners. And you just have to paint a fairly different picture when you do a solo record. You don't have to do what's expected of you on a Rolling Stones record and so you can go off in slightly different directions."

Like on the funny, rollicking new jet-set song Everybody's Getting High, set in the worlds of film and fashion.

"I'm checkin' out the Kung Fu actor/ Boy, is he way up his ass," Jagger sings. "He won't even talk to me/ But he wants to show me how to dance."

When I ask to whom he's referring, Jagger starts laughing again, and gets coy.

"Ah! You've got to figure it out. I can't reveal. I can't tell you that."