LePage is back with new CD; Gadoury Trio set for release party Sunday.

• Position: ENTERTAINMENT & LIFESTYLE

Byline: Craig S. Semon

After 25 years of self-imposed exile due to debilitating panic attacks and extreme stage fright, Nick's comeback kid, Dale LePage, is once again taking center stage and knocking them dead with his new disc, "The Bobby Gadoury Trio featuring Dale LePage."

"It's the light at the end of the tunnel," the Templeton native said inside his castle (and I mean castle) in the Tatnuck area of Worcester, as he reflects on his topsy-turvy, sometimes stomach-churning career and his big (and reportedly sold-out) CD release party with The Bobby Gadoury Trio from 5 to 9 p.m. Sunday at Nick's, 124 Millbury St., Worcester.

LePage's early introduction to music was him innocently singing ribald French songs with his Canadian grandfather

when the two used to go fishing. And to this day, LePage credits "Paps" for teaching him how to sing, an artistic trait that definitely ran in his family.

"Most of the songs that I was taught by him are not suitable for the public," LePage said with a knowing laugh. "They were all racy. I didn't know what I was singing. I was 10."

While it was his grandfather who instilled the love of music in him, the adolescent Le-Page was too shy to sing for the bulk of his stay at Narragansett Regional High School. Then he scored one of the male leads in "The Sound of Music" his senior year.

"I really only sang in my senior year because I figured it was now or never," Le-Page recalled. "I was just to shy, painfully shy."

Although he shows a kinship to Sinatra (and will be one of the artists performing as part of "The Sinatra Songbook" celebration on Dec. 2, 5, 12 and 19), LePage's "little town blues" were very Springsteen-esque.

"I moved to Worcester when I could drive. I needed to have a career in music. You couldn't do that in Templeton," LePage said. "When I drove down Park Ave., from Templeton to Park Avenue, I said out loud, `This must be what Las Vegas is like.' There was no going home after that."

LePage lived in his car for about a month, At night, he would park his car close to a convent because he thought that he would be "really safe" (turned out that he was). He got himself a job at a now defunct Worcester restaurant that would regularly have great live entertainment coming in from Boston.

One night, pianist Jack Swan heard LePage crooning in the kitchen and checked to see what was cooking. The piano player coxed him out of the heat of the kitchen for the real heat of the stage lights, and LePage belted out...