Do your own thang.

It's instant career jeopardy for the standard pop star, but that's never been an issue for Jane Siberry, who performs solo at Barrymores tonight.

After carving her own path through pop music's jungle for the better part of 20 years, the pop chanteuse and angelic waif is crawling into bed, figuratively speaking, with a dozen different partners, musical collaborators she's collected over the past decade on her new CD, City.

It's an intriguing experience of creative schizophrenia, alloying herself with writing partners -- as diverse as Peter Gabriel, Joe Jackson, French classical composer Hector Zazou, classical violinist Kennedy, the late Laura Nyro, filmmaker Wim Wenders, even Barney the purple dinosaur -- to make City as splendidly eccentric listening as, well, Siberry's collection of old lullabies from last year, Hush.

"It's very intimate collaborating," she hints from the backseat of an Atlanta cab. "It's sexy, you're so close to another but you're working as one."

So while City is never the same thing from one cut to the next, it still has the unmistakable Siberry stamp of deceptively child-like songs written with some real adult anguish and heartbreak.

Siberry counts Gabriel and the Indigo Girls among her favourite collaborators.

"I see the song before I hear it," she explains, "and with Gabriel and the Indigos, we would see and hear the same thing."

For an artist who's marketed her product as carefully as Siberry, going so far as to shill her stuff -- 13 albums and three books through her own website www. sheeba.ca -- it's a little bit like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute for her.

"People are looking for simple things right now," says Siberry. "If they find it in my music, I'm happy."

Tickets for tonight's show are $22 and are available at Barrymores or Ticketmaster (755-1111 to charge).