Ordinarily, one hesitates to encourage musicians to take themselves too seriously. But in Steven Page's case, it's sort of endearing.

Since the Barenaked Ladies burst on to the scene in the early 1990s, there's always been an ambitious side to their co-frontman - and normally, it pops up on a couple of tracks per album. But like the rest of his bandmates, Page has mostly played the clown, especially since the U.S. breakthrough of 1998's Stunt - driven by the ubiquitous One Week - pigeonholed the band as a sort of novelty act, albeit one with unusual longevity.

So if Page - now into his mid-thirties, with three kids and a healthy social conscience - is going slightly toward the other extreme, we should probably cut him some slack.

The Toronto native's first non-BNL outing, a collaboration with long-time songwriting partner Stephen Duffy (with whom Page has penned some of BNL's comparatively weightier work), is nothing if not mature. Its title - The Vanity Project - is virtually its only nod to whimsy; Page is otherwise in full singer-songwriter mode, forsaking his poppier instincts to serve up reflective and understated tunes aimed more at establishing credibility than getting radio play.

"There were songs that we recorded that were probably lighter or more poppy, ones that are more uptempo, that may surface at some time," he says, holed up in a Toronto hotel room. "But we thought it was pretty important to come up with a unified tone for this record."

Naturally, Page offers the standard explanation for any long-time band member going solo: It's necessary for the group to stay strong. "In order to want to keep collaborating with the same people, you have to do other things," he contends. "Most artists of any kind don't collaborate with the same four guys their entire career."

But in his case, there's something more to it. Clearly a little frustrated with the niche BNL finds itself in, he's quite obviously trying to win over discriminating fans outside the band's base.

The crowd that might appreciate some of BNL's more subtle offerings, he suggests, can be turned off by the band's image, its radio-friendly hits and the comedy act that competes with the music at his shows. Page believes he has more in common with those folks than they'd think, and he's out to prove it.

"I have no aspirations for [The Vanity Project] to compete with the success of the Barenaked Ladies commercially," he says. "But I've always had a sense that there are people who share musical tastes with me who'd probably like a lot of the Barenaked Ladies' music if they allowed themselves.

"For me, this'll be a success if it's brought a new audience, or an old audience back - people who thought that perhaps we weren't for them anymore."

There's another upside to branching out, too. An outspoken activist who's campaigned for NDP leader Jack Layton, Page is experimenting with inserting his political views into his music.

The new disc's most striking track (and, ironically, its poppiest) is Wilted Rose - an offering that inserts Pierre Trudeau into the chorus and finds the singer questioning his faith in his country.

The song, he says, was prompted by the events surrounding 2001's Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City. "I had a lot of friends who went to peacefully demonstrate and were treated like shit," he says. "Just watching it on TV, I was saying, 'What's the difference anymore?' That's the question. Why am I here?

"There was a point where I thought, 'OK, are we just the U.S. with worse weather?' But I think that was also definitely a wake-up call for me to start engaging."

The guy who once wore his Scarborough residence as a badge of honour is clearly warming to dissent.

"I'm frustrated, and I think one of the things I'm always frustrated by is Canadians' desire to beat their chests and say 'we're so great' because we have gay marriage or something. There are still fundamental issues all over this country - economic issues and political issues and environmental issues and so on - that we should be embarrassed about. We can't just rest on our laurels all the time."

Nor, it seems, can Page. Self-consciously mature, The Vanity Project may not be everything it sets out to be. But laurels be damned, there are signs that at long last, the serious artist within him is bubbling to the surface.