Steven Page is happy to play a show supporting a school music program.

He knows firsthand the impact it can have.

“There would be no Barenaked Ladies, and thus no music career for me, if it hadn’t been for the school music program,” Page said during a telephone interview.

Page is a founding member of Barenaked Ladies and performed with the Canadian band from its 1992 debut release “Gordon” until 2009. He sang lead or co-lead vocals and wrote or co-wrote many of the group’s best-known songs, including, “Brian Wilson,” “If I Had a Million Dollars,” “It’s All Been Done,” “The Old Apartment” and “Call and Answer.”

On Saturday he’ll be at Packard Music Hall for the Southeast Music Gala for a concert that also includes Street Corner Symphony (an a cappella group that was runner-up on season two of the reality competition series “The Sing Off”), Panyard Steel Orchestra and bands and choirs from Southeast Local Schools in Ravenna. Proceeds will benefit the district’s instrument replacement fund.

“If it hadn’t been for music in my high school career, I probably wouldn’t have graduated,” Page said. “I probably wouldn’t have made it through school. It absolutely saved my life.”

He played flute in the school band and said he was terrible, but he found his place in an all-city choir made up of 100 students from around the city of Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto.

“It was just the most amazing life-shaping experience for me,” he said. “Singing is such an incredibly intimate thing. You know, it’s something that’s in all of our bodies, and it takes some guts to let yourself be that intimate with other people around you. There you are making these same sounds together, coming out of your body. What a strange thing to do. The choir director was a very imposing and commanding kind of figure who was passionate about the music, and we did everything from classical stuff like Mozart or Verdi all the way to showtunes and spirituals and folk songs.

“I wasn’t a sports kid, so I didn’t have that team thing. And here we’re all in a room trying to achieve excellence, trying to achieve something bigger and better than what we could do on our own. And, you know, I think I chase that to this day. That’s part of why I make music now, because of the experiences I had then.”

The choir did a tour of England when Page was 15, which made him an Anglophile and an even bigger music fan. The choir also ran an all-city music camp every June, which is where Page met his future Barenaked Ladies bandmates.

Page called a school putting on a benefit to replenish its musical instrument fun an encouraging sign, but he’s also frustrated by the need for such events as funding for the arts in schools is one of the first places where budget cuts are made. And it’s a trend in his native Canada as well as the U.S.

“People have resorted to saying things like, ‘Learning music is important because it helps you with math,'” Page said. “My point is, I don’t care if it helps you with math, it helps you with music, and music is a valuable tool, and it’s also something to actually do for a living, just the same way that people strive for sports or whatever else.

“If you’re good at it and it helps you get into a good college, that’s a great leg up. But the idea of being able to play an instrument or express yourself musically, particularly with other people, I think is more important now than it’s ever been.”

These days Page makes music with his own trio and has released five solo albums, the most recent of which is “Excelsior” in 2022. He also collaborated with playwright Daniel Macivor on “Here’s What It Takes,” a musical about a fictional rock duo that was supposed to debut at Ontario’s Stratford Festival in 2020 but was a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He teamed up with some fellow Canadians — Chris Murphy of Sloan, Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness and Craig Northey of Odds — to form the Trans-Canada Highwaymen, whose 2023 album featured covers of songs that were hits by Canadian artists in the late1960s and early ’70s. Go to transcanadahighwaymen.ca to check out the deliberately cheesy K-Tel style infomercial created to promote the band’s debut album.

“Half the reason for doing the band was just so we could do that infomercial,” Page said.

It’s a side project they plan to continue whenever everyone’s schedules align, and Page said he wasn’t sure what impact immersing himself in those old pop hits might have on his own songwriting in the future.

“That’s an interesting question. I think the production style of those songs has always been fascinating to me, so to be able to spend time listening to the original recordings, without completely aping the production style, learning what’s cool and what’s worth hanging onto and what we could learn from it was a big part of it. But as far as songwriting, I think that stuff is already so deeply ingrained in the way I write. I think the way I write was informed by the stuff I grew up with as a teenager and then whatever I’m listening to now, but deep down in the DNA of it is the stuff that was on the AM radio when my mom was making me breakfast. And that’s what that stuff is.”

If you go …

WHAT: Southeast Music Gala Fundraiser with Steven Page, Street Corner Symphony, Panyard Steel Orchestra and Southeast Schools bands and choirs

WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday

WHERE: Packard Music Hall, 1703 Mahoning Ave NW, Warren

HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $53 to $103 and are available through Ticketmaster.