Though Valentine's Day has now passed, romanticism need not stop there, according to Canadian singer-songwriter Jill Barber.

“Sometimes we need a little bit of escapism, or we need to have imaginations about the possibilities for love and romance,” she said.

That's what her new album, entitled Chances, is about — the opportunity for that perfect, blissful feeling of true love.

Chances is a collection of jazz-influenced pop tunes that takes influence from big band jazz era; a small orchestra of strings, woodwinds, brass and even vibraphone accompany her guitar, banjo and voice on a soulful journey that re-invigorates the genre with a sense of originality.

“I've been wanting to make an album that sounds like this for a long time,” Barber said during a brief phone conversation last week. “Some people are so very modern it's cutting edge, [but] I've looked back, done my research, and tried to see what works... what I'm trying to do is make music that won't go out of style... I'm trying to emulate a certain quality of timelessness that I hear in a lot of those older songs.”

It's a tall order, and this young songstress has approached the task with zeal and enthusiasm, but Barber's music wasn't always so far reaching. An honour's philosophy graduate from Queen's University, she was once just following in her brother's footsteps — fellow singer-songwriter Matthew Barber.

It was there that she discovered a knack for the stage through her minor in theatre, but Barber knew her real passion lay in musical performance.

After graduation she moved to Halifax, her place of residence until very recently. There, Barber set up camp, toured and played for years as “a girl with an acoustic guitar.” Things changed last year, however, when she was invited to perform with Symphony Nova Scotia.

“[The concert] opened my mind to the possibilities of filling out all my sound with this lush, beautiful instrumentation,” Barber said. “I knew from that point on that I wanted to try to capture some of the magic of that full, lush, film-score kind of romanticism on my record.”

It was producer and guitarist Les Cooper who helped her realize this vision through Chances, and they weren't frugal about doing it. The Glenn Gould studio was rented out for a string section in early 2008, to capture that old-time feeling.

And like many of the jazz recordings that influenced Barber, Chances deals almost exclusively with love. However, that being said, it's important to note that the songs never become redundant; the variety of themes she tackles prevents the songs from convolution.

Nor is Barber's sense of romanticism entirely naive.

“Love and relationships are not simple, of course,' she said. “They never have been and they never will be, but I think what is at the heart of at least my love songs is a certain hopefulness, or a hope for romance, a dreamy whimsical belief that everything is romantic.”

And as a scholar of philosophy, Barber has incorporated love into her personal and spiritual belief.

“I'm not a religious person, but I do think that having faith in love is a really beautiful thing. That's not just romantic love, but love - friends, family or anybody, just fellow people. If we don't believe in love, or believe in love stories that we see in films or that we hear about in songs, then I don't know, I feel like there's no hope for us.”

Barber will be performing a matinee concert at the Aeolian Hall on Sunday, February 22 at 3pm.