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Last night I had dinner in Italy.

I had the best seafood pasta dish ever, outside of the homemade stuff. Just to show you how authentic it was - they didn't even offer any parmesan cheese with it. Italians put cheese on every pasta dish imaginable, but on seafood it's traditionally considered to be a backhand to the chef.

So, I just decided to drive to Italy, have dinner, go for a stroll by the sea with an ice cream for dessert, and then leave.

Since The Essentials are a Canadian vocal group, this may sound proximally impossible and a little hoity-toity so I'll explain the backstory: I'm in France on vacation.

Being in the music business, it's tough to schedule a vacation. Something always seems to come up like a gig, or the possibility of a gig, or the rumoured chance of a possible gig.

Two years ago I was online ready to book a trip to anywhere with palm trees and unsafe drinking water. I called my manager to have him bestow his final blessing on me, but that very morning a gig had come in that conflicted, so I was screwed. So I haven't travelled 'just for the hey of it' in almost 5 years.

We have a little window in our schedule before we start releasing Nothing But Blue to radio, and since Thom's in Quebec doing something with pigs, I snuck in a jaunt to France. I found myself 64 km from the Italian border and thought, "I gotta go".

Although I was born in Canada, my parents were both born in Italy. Even though I wasn't born there and my cousins that still live there view me as a wholly certified mangiacake, sometimes a little bit of you can feel connected to a place that wasn't technically ever your home.

Even for one night.

Which brings me to Merla Mae.

I started singing there when I was a high schooler. It was all 50s/60's straight doowop back then because that's what the gig called for.

At the urging of our sage then-manager Terry McManus, we started recording or "makin' records" as our then-producer Jack Richardson puts it.

As the group grew, we eventually decided to move on and move to Toronto, leaving that neon-lit ice cream parlour behind for the fluorescent lights of a larger city.

But London will always be home for us individually and for the group.

London is where Janet and I were both born and Thom and Dan call Forest, Ontario home which is only 80 clicks away. Close enough for me.

And Merla Mae specifically is the birthplace and therefore home of The Essentials. It always will be. Merla Mae is where we cut our teeth, so it means something to us.

And we'll be glad to be back there in the middle of this month.

Even for one night.

The Essentials rarely visit Merla Mae anymore. The last time was two years ago, and before that, Bill Clinton was in the White House. So, it always seems very difficult to find a hole in our schedule to make it back to Merla Mae.

So we hope, if you're anywhere within a 64 km radius of London that you make it to the Merla Mae on Sat Aug 14th at 7pm.

Hope to see you there!