A smokey cabaret. Quiet couples cling close together, afraid that the secrets they aren't speaking may slip out and drift to mingle with the smell of cigarettes and alcohol. Behind a baby grand piano sits a chunky, middle-aged British man. He plunks out the opening notes to a melancholy melody about love, then sings: "Pull my coat around me, Feel the cold wind haunt me, Streets are empty, just like me..."

Cut to a Broadway stage. The leading man has just broken the ingenue's heart for the seventh time that week, each time with a different crowd of voyeurs observing and vicariously feeling every tear. Silence settles for a moment as a chunky, middle-aged British man lifts his baton and cues the opening notes to the final ballad: "Take me for granted; I think that I could stand it. After all these rough seas, left me reckless and abandoned..."

These are the two main characters singing throughout Elton John's new album "The Big Picture." It is a work at turns intimate and theatrical, exuberant and angry, satisfied and unsettled. The lyrics throughout speak of doubt and restlessness, and the music often matches these moods, with songs that shift between gentle and fierce in the span of less than a measure. The bottom line is that there is more to this Elton John record than a few adult-contemporary hits and heavy-rotation videos on VH1. It has as much texture and depth as any of his best work.

It's immediately obvious in listening to "The Big Picture" that the credit for the music's texture and atmosphere must go to producer Chris Thomas. He has worked on and off with Elton since 1981's "The Fox," and over time his sound has become more and more dependent on the use of synthesizers and drum machines, cultivating in 1991's "The One," in which vocals and real instruments were drowned by synths, programmed drums, and bizarre sound effects (the random call of a seagull, for example). This album takes the sonic goals of "The One" and achieves them where the previous album failed. Elton's vocals are right in the front of each song, and the instruments are each distinct in the mix, with electronic effects used not as a stifling overlay but a background enhancement. Instead of an overproduced, manufactured mess, "The Big Picture" succeeds in creating a true atmosphere with its sound. It's a clearly produced atmosphere, but in the best sense of the term.

Elton's songwriting this time around matches the album's strengths in production, featuring mostly mid-tempo power ballads that explode with passion and intensity. Unlike many of Elton's mid-eighties albums, where he sounded like he could have been phoning in the vocals from Jamaica, there is meaning and committment behind every note he sings on "The Big Picture." On "If the River Can Bend," an amazing gospel rocker, Elton joins the East London Gospel Choir in singing as though he had just found his saving grace. But Elton's vocal gifts are suited not just for the obvious belting, but for more subtle stylings as well. There's a slight grit in his voice on the first single from the album, "Something About the Way You Look Tonight," that gives his singing a desperate feel, as though the object of the beauty has been his one salvation.

Behind the lyrics on this album lurks salvation, either the search for it or a complete lack thereof. The title track is about finding one's place in "The Big Picture," the first single is about having found your place in the form of love, and "I Can't Steer My Heart Clear of You" is about believing you've found your place in "The Big Picture," finding out you're wrong, and then realizing you're emotionally unable to escape a damaging relationship. The music is spiced with gospel and R&B twinges, lending an old-style religious aspect to the salvation search. If salvation can be found in pop music (as Springsteen and myself are wont to believe), then "The Big Picture" is a huge dose of what Elton John seems to be searching for.