Submitted photo Gino Vannelli’s concert at Packard Music Hall is the last show he has scheduled in 2026 as he shifts focus to his next album and his first novel.

Many people know Gino Vannelli from his hits, songs such as “I Just Wanna Stop” and “Living Inside Myself,” which were top 10 singles in multiple formats.

But Vannelli never envisioned himself as a singles artist.

“The downside is that there’s an expectation that you’ll do it again,” Vannelli said. “It wasn’t something I really wanted to do. I wanted to pursue things I pursued later on in albums like ‘Yonder Tree’ and ‘Slow Love,’ doing a classical album, ‘Canto,’ and doing more of a crossover/ fusion album like ‘A Good Thing.’ I really wanted to explore music and not just be a slave to the marketplace.

“I figured that the marketplace would catch up with me or would take what they wanted from me. And this is where the faith kicks in, where you have faith that things will turn out OK if you just do what comes to you naturally.”

Vannelli, who was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame last year, will bring that varied catalog of music to Packard Music Hall for a Mother’s Day concert.

Vannelli’s divers e musical interests come from a childhood dominated by music, starting with a father who sang in dance bands in Montreal.

“The fact that you’re hearing music 24/7 when you’re a kid starting when you’re 3 years old, it’s going to have a profound effect,” he said. “You’re either going to love it and want to pursue it or hate it. And mine was the former, of course.”

He was listening to opera at age 5 and could name all of the composers of the classical music he was hearing at age 7.

His favorite television show was a weekly program hosted by jazz pianist Oscar Peterson on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Vannelli started out as a drummer and would play along with the band on Peterson’s show. He made the transition to singing as a teenager.

“My drum kit was my fortress, and as soon as I left the fortress, I felt very vulnerable, and there wasn’t a mic stand wide enough to cover,” he said. “But as soon as I attracted some attention, some of the 14-year-old girls kind of moved up to the front of the stage — ‘OK, this is good.'”

Vannelli wasn’t the only one of his siblings enchanted with music. His brother, Joe Vannelli, was an arranger on Vannelli’s debut album for A&M Records and worked with him for decades as a musician, producer and songwriter.

Ross Vannelli also worked as an arranger, producer and songwriter on many of his brother’s albums and also has written songs for such artists as Ann Wilson, Robin Znader, Richard Marx, Celine Dion and Earth, Wind and Fire. He also is his brother’s manager and wrote his biggest hit, “I Just Wanna Stop.”

“Ross came over and said, ‘I got a song,’ and started playing it,” Vannelli said, remembering the first time he heard it. “I did resist chasing a top 40 kind of hit, but if it came along naturally, then I was fine with it. I found that everybody chasing that kind of song really brought down the level of writing. I thought if it could happen naturally, it’d be fine. And this was a very, very natural occurrence. He just wrote it, and I just learned it on the guitar and fooling around with it. It sounded really natural, and it sounded like it could be very appealing.”

The success of that song — a number one single in Canada, top 10 in the U.S. on both the Billboard Hot 100 and adult contemporary chart a Juno Award for best male artist and a Grammy nomination for best pop male vocal performance — was part of a span where Vannelli released a dozen albums in less than 20 years.

“My ambitions were insatiable. I just wanted to write and perform, write and perform. I would tour over 100 nights a year, and I would put out an album every year, and then something changed. I just didn’t want to do that kind of music anymore. I was approaching 40, and I just said no more.

“It took a beat for the audience to catch up with me, but they eventually did, and I had, I think, a richer career than I would have had trying to be my former self or some shadow version of it.”

Those songs from the ’70s and ’80s make up the bulk of his setlist decades later, but he also has been including a couple of songs from his most recent album “The Life I Got — To My Most Beloved.” Most of the songs were inspired by his wife Patricia, who died in 2024 after a five-year battle with cancer.

“There’s a few songs on that record that I do live, like ‘Stormy River’ and ‘A Little Bit Broken,’ and sometimes I get a little choked up, because I wrote them while Tricia was with us, and it was so hard to see her just wither away.”

Sunday’s concert in Warren is the last performance Vannelli has scheduled this year. He said he’s focused on working on material for his next album, and he’s also in the editing phase on his first novel.

While they’re different mediums, Vannelli said there are similarities to his writing process, whether it’s a song or a story.

“I need to hear music in the language,” he said. “I like the sentences, the phrases, the thoughts to flow like music, so there’s a little bit of poetic prose to it. And I keep shaving it the way I would shave song lyrics, almost like you’re sculpting. It’s a little bit different for me, but I have that kind of lyricist mindset where I need to keep polishing until it flows very gently off my lips.”

If you go …

WHAT: Gino Vannelli

WHEN: 7 p.m. Sunday

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

HOW MUCH: Tickets range from $32.75 to $69.75 and are available at the Packard box office and through Ticketmaster.