With voice, words, and piano, Patricia Barber delivers intelligence and insouciance. She is a singular jazz singer and pianist, but for the last few years it is her songwriting that has been attracting big attention. In concert, she confides by whispering a song of sweet nothings into the listener's ear, then surprises with a rock-edged and trashy song about a one-night stand. She comes across more street-smart than book-smart.

And now Barber's gone academic, though the result is perhaps the most accessible music of her career. Over the past two years, Barber has been busy recording an eleven-song cycle. She titled it Mythologiesand based it on The Metamorphoses of Ovid – the centuries-old classic of Western literature, filled with gods, mortals and apparently, humor.

"Ovid was a Roman poet who was putting a spin on Greek mythology," says Barber. "I just couldn't believe what a wonderful writer he was – how funny and smart and brilliant are these characters he created. He doesn't flesh them out so I can understand why opera composers and librettists throughout history have used Ovid again and again."

But – a jazz song cycle based on characters from Greek mythology? "I was definitely looking at other song cycles for inspiration, but they tend to be more in the classical realm. There were very few that I can recall in what I would call popular music, and jazz song cycles just don't seem to exist. It occurred to me that I could write a song cycle based on these characters but it was something that I thought would be a luxury and I would need some time off."

Time off does not come too easy to a career-focused jazz performer like Barber who has spent years developing a unique sound and an international following. For close to fifteen years, the Chicago-based singer/pianist has led her own band, toured tirelessly and is now, in every sense of the word, a success. She has recorded a series of utterly original and critically acclaimed albums, including Cafe Blue, Modern Cool, Nightclub, Verse, and Live: A Fortnight in France.

Mythologies is Barber's ninth career album, and comprises eleven tracks of varying musical styles and moods, each based on a character from Ovid's masterwork. It was a project that demanded focus and a bit of self-education – but how to set aside the time?

"I only thought of this project as a real possibility when I was thinking of applying for the Guggenheim Fellowship. It seemed the right kind of project because it was so rarified, and my life as it was couldn't justify all the time spent on research that would be necessary."

Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded annually "to men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." They are cash gifts intended to defray living costs allowing for focus on a single project; past recipients have included writer Noam Chomsky, poet e. e. cummings, and the classical composer Aaron Copland. Jazz musicians are a rarity, and a popular songwriter had never received a Guggenheim until 2003, when Patricia Barber was added to the list.

"I didn't necessarily expect to get the fellowship but then when I did I was thrilled. Actually this is the first grant in my life that I ever applied for." Barber received a year-long grant to study, compose and create a book of songs. How she achieved that end was up to her.

"I forced myself to study as much as I actually wrote. I had always studied songwriters like Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart. With the Fellowship, I used the time to study the great poets and the great classical composers, especially Chopin, some Verdi. And Schubert! His meter. His song. I would play them on the piano and I have notebooks charting the harmonies. Sometimes you'll hear in opera how a melodic line can float over a harmony – justify an unusual harmonic change. That was definitely something I learned during this year that was really a great lesson for me, very different from a Cole Porter kind of a song."

Barber looks back on the process as beneficial. "It's made me a much better musician, a better songwriter. It is exciting to have tools to enrich what I already know about jazz and popular songwriting."

Mythologies is the product of a careful balancing of the musical and literary – offering Barber's fans a number of ways into the music. "I'm very careful as a songwriter to give the songs multiple associations, but there should be an immediate satisfaction upon hearing a song. If it doesn't work the first time it's sung, it doesn't work. And then, hopefully it will wear well too."

Mythologies is also the product of a varied and flexible songwriting approach. In fact, as Barber recalls, "it's different for every song – sometimes the words came first. Sometimes the [melody] line was first.

"Some songs like ‘Morpheus' sound simple but in fact are more complex: I knew ahead of time I wanted it to be two 16-bar sections. Having studied Schubert and harmony, I wrote a chordal structure. Then I laid a melody over that and a poem over that, the rhyme scheme based on a poem by [Lord Alfred] Tennyson. Some songs, like ‘Whiteworld,' were written with less precision and more instinct."