On his 2006 disc Treeful of Starling, Canuck troubadour Hawksley Workman traded in his glam-rock theatrics for a more subdued, stripped-down vibe, claiming he wanted to see what he could accomplish by whispering instead of shouting.

Well, it would appear he's got all that whispering out of his system, as the followup to Treeful -- the just-released Between the Beautifuls -- again finds the notoriously flamboyant rocker in, well, flamboyant rocker mode.

"I'd say Between the Beautifuls falls somewhere between Treeful and (2003's) Lover/Fighter," says Workman. "But yeah, it's ramping up to another screaming rock record. What can I tell you? I'm a drummer, first and foremost. I'm a John Bonham fanatic. Led Zeppelin are the closest thing to heaven on earth that I know."

Now before you go getting any ideas, know that Workman's latest doesn't bear any traces of Tolkien-inspired guitar gods, or 20-minute drum solos. But it does explore the middle ground between his more intimate, acoustic tendencies and the flashy cabaret-pop that earned him his fanbase in the first place.

Not coincidentally, Workman (aka Ontario resident Ryan Corrigan) says the title refers to the state of flux he often finds himself in, despite having once believed adulthood would be the panacea to all his problems.

"You're led to believe, as an adolescent, that you're going to grow up, get a job, and all of a sudden you'll be in your niche, and you'll have arrived," says Workman. "What I'm realizing, at 32, is that I'm always going to be in a state of criticism and self-loathing. I'm always going to be miles away from where I want to be."

When it came time to record the new disc, Workman -- who'd banished himself to the California desert to make Treeful -- holed up in a newly built studio at his home in Burk's Falls, Ont.

"It was very stable, and I was in one place for winter and spring, and I haven't had that for a long time," he explains. "I was living with someone who was taking lots of pictures because she was studying horticulture, so I started to be acutely aware of spring -- all the bugs and the gooey juiciness that starts to take shape, which is something I'd lost sight of."

Workman -- a heart-on-his-sleeve romantic whose self-styled mythology involved a stint polishing the rental shoes at a tap-dancing academy -- says he's sitting on another two albums' worth of material, much of which has already cropped up on the Europe-only release Los Manlicious.

Others are available on CDs sold only at his shows, and while he's still not sure whether the tunes will ever get a proper release, he has no interest in keeping them for himself.

"I definitely am just a conduit. In 10 years of doing my job, I've only ever let three or four songs simmer on the back burner," he says. "I have a faith and a belief that the creative thing is always going to be there, so I don't want to jinx it. It's kind of like money -- money is energy, and songs are energy. And if you start to hoard them (the songs), it's like water rotting in a trough."

And don't be too surprised to see Workman giving his inner rock star a workout sometime soon. After all, if there's one thing the last 10 years have taught him, it's the importance of changing with the times.

"Songwriting and rock 'n' roll is like being in a marriage," he says. "When I was 22, that was a great time. It was lusty and it was wild and it was like falling in love with songwriting for the first time. But the relationship changes. You're constantly negotiating new ways to keep it fresh."