When folk-music fans think of Steven Page, if they think of him at all, it's probably as a founding member of the Barenaked Ladies, and as the author of such semi-disposable pop ditties as “Brian Wilson” and “If I Had $1000000”.

Dig a little deeper, however, and it soon becomes obvious that Page fully deserves to tread the main-stage boards at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, as he will on Saturday (July 18). Not only is he a keen student of the singer-songwriter's art, he also grew up in the very cradle of Canadian folk music, Toronto's fabled Mariposa Folk Festival. “My dad was the chairman of the festival from '69 to '71, or something like that—a few years during its real heyday,” Page recalls, on the line from his part-time home in Syracuse, New York. “He always had stories about picking up Taj Mahal at the airport or paying 50 bucks to James Taylor or the year that Bob Dylan showed up unannounced. One of my earliest memories was being on the ferry on the way over to the Toronto Islands, where Mariposa used to be, and seeing Pete Seeger. So I grew up with a lot of that music, and the house was always filled with everything from folk to jazz to whatever rock 'n' roll was on the radio at the time.”

Page seems to be maintaining those eclectic appetites in his new solo career. Rather than mope about his split with the Barenaked Ladies in February of this year, he's thrown himself into scoring the Stratford production of Ben Jonson's 1614 play Bartholomew Fair. English traditional music as well as various Eastern European and North African styles factor in the soundtrack, he notes, while revealing that his next CD release will be a collection of folk, pop, and rock covers recorded with Toronto's Art of Time Ensemble.

“They're led by a classical pianist named Andrew Burashko, and his concept is to take people from the classical world and the jazz world and the pop world and arrange songs for this new ensemble,” Page explains. “So it's a six-piece group with piano, violin, cello, bass, guitar, and sax, as well as vocals. They just did a record with Sarah Slean [Black Flowers], which is a beautiful record, really lovely. Mine, though, as is typically my style, is a lot more eclectic and schizophrenic.”

The singer-guitarist also notes that he's begun work on his first true solo album—if you discount The Vanity Project, his 2005 collaboration with Stephen Duffy, an early member of Duran Duran. It's too early in the process, though, for him to divulge many details.

“I do seem to have written a number of songs about sailing,” he allows, sounding mildly perplexed. “But I hope it's sailing in the grand English folk tradition and not the Christopher Cross, yacht-rock tradition. I mean, I always remind myself which way to point the bow of the ship.”