It's the end of the world and Hawksley Workman feels quite fine, thanks very much.

You can hear it on Workman's bright, beautiful new disc Treeful of Starling -- well, the new CD he chose to release, anyway.

Workman, who performs tonight at Knox United Church, says last year he actually made a couple of other records meant to follow up his 2003 release Lover/Fighter.

One of them was written, he says, during an "extreme drinking, extreme loathing, extreme extreme period. And it's the same record (as Treeful of Starling) except extremely dark, bleak and unforgiving."

A trip down to California dried him out and sunnied things up considerably, producing the album we now have.

"It's still an apocalypse record, but it's more like a children's apocalypse record," he says, noting the album's theme of innocence and death is perfect for the time we're in.

"The prognosis for a lot of elements of this life it seems fairly obvious ... I don't think you have to be gifted with a prophetic sense to feel that things are changing and it doesn't feel quite right.

"And I'm not saying that it somehow alleviates our responsibility to be kind human beings and that we should be orgying in the street, it means more that the responsibility to truly live while we're here and remain in the moment and operate as creatures with a pure intent seems more important now ...

"Of course," he says with a laugh, "that just could be grand thinking on my part."

It is, but it's something that has made Workman one of this country's most interesting and original artists. He's also one of the most unpredictable and uncompromising -- set for rock stardom one minute, retreating into a quiet musical shell the next.

Workman admits the latter is true of Treeful. But he's also upappologetic, noting the album was one he had to make for himself.

"When you make a record like this ... it's not where you think, 'I'm going to make something beautiful and the world is going to love it,' " he says. "You know now when you make something beautiful the world is very likely to reject it -- in large numbers anyway.

"And that's fine by me because this record kind of saved my life in a lot of ways.

"It gave me a reason to bring some sort of purity back into my life and it reminded me that I was still a great songwriter and it did all sorts of things for me."