By Cédric Vernet 
From his early power trios to playing alongside Calvin Russell and Féfé, Jérémy Filsonne has travelled many musical roads before recording Sous le ciel with his father, Paul Personne. Blues Actu spoke to him about his beginnings, the music he shares with his family, his explorations with Blob & Filsonne and how this father-and-son album came together. Following a promising first single, Sous le ciel is due out on November 20.
Jérémy Filsonne interviewed by Cédric Vernet
You chose the name Jérémy Filsonne, replacing “per” with “fils” [son]. Was it important to acknowledge your family connection while also putting a little distance between yourself and your father?
As it happens, the nickname was invented by a childhood friend of Paul Personne, Gérard Benassayag, who played bass in La Folle Entreprise, among other bands, when I was eight or nine. He was always teasing me, calling me “fils du père qui sonne” [son of the father who plays] or “Personne’s son”, and eventually Filsonne. Decades later, I adopted the nickname.
And as you say, beyond the joke, it perhaps gives me a little more artistic freedom, a way to stand apart, even though I know the comparisons will always be inevitable.
With Paul Personne as your father, guitars must never have been far away. Which record or musician made you want to pick one up and play for yourself?
I got my little classical guitar at seven. At that age, I was also into video games, skateboarding and model-making. I started playing more regularly at fourteen or fifteen, when I got my first Stratocaster. That’s when I became obsessed with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix, Rory Gallagher and all those guitar heroes who played Strats! More generally, I also grew up with my father’s entire record collection, from the Allman Brothers Band to the Rolling Stones, from Janis Joplin to John Mayall, and many more…
Gloria was more into rockabilly and had a vinyl collection featuring Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, the Stray Cats… She had me perform on a live radio show for the first time when I was ten or eleven! She was a radio presenter back then. I played a sixties song by Johnny Hallyday, singing and playing guitar, “J’abandonne tous mes amours”, I think. Listeners were calling in. The cassette must still be lying around in a box somewhere. That was also when they took me to lots of concerts: Van Morrison, Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton, Gary Moore, the Allman Brothers Band, and plenty more…
I’d say all of that encouraged me to take the guitar more seriously!
Tell us a little about your journey as a musician leading up to Sous le ciel.
I formed my first bands in the mid-1990s: Greyland, Feedback, then Wigwam, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, splitting my time between Ardèche, where my mother lived, and Mantes-la-Jolie. They were power trios in which I sang and wrote songs. As soon as we had three songs, even with improvised gibberish lyrics, we’d start approaching venues willing to have us. We played almost anywhere, although the gigs were uneven because we improvised so much. Things became more structured later on. It was an incredible and very formative time.
I was beginning to explore other kinds of music: The Clash, Fela Kuti, John Coltrane, Portishead, the Beastie Boys, PJ Harvey… I was like a sponge, constantly soaking up music of every style and era, surrounded by family and friends for whom music was everywhere.
After a short stay in London, I joined the Azalaï collective (French chanson and Celtic rock) in Lyon in the early 2000s. That adventure lasted four years, with two albums and lots of concerts.
After your time in Lyon, which encounters shaped the next stage of your career?
First, there was the long tour with Paul Personne in 2003…
In Paris in 2007, Manu Lanvin brought me in to play on Dawg eat dawg by Texan musician Calvin Russell, which he was producing, and on Russell’s final tour. I also accompanied Manu Lanvin during the early days of his Devil’s Blues, on guitar or bass. In 2018, he invited me to play slide guitar on Grand Casino.
From 2012 to 2015, I toured the world with rapper and singer Féfé (formerly of Saïan Supa Crew) following his second solo album, Le charme des premiers jours.
A few bouts of tinnitus later, in 2016, I recorded three tracks in the studio (Détours, Irabien and Tu vois), independently, with the excellent rhythm section of Julien Tekeyan and Mike Clinton. It was the beginning of a solo album that would end up staying on the shelf.
I left Paris for Normandy, then joined French-Welsh pop band Shake Shake Go as lead guitarist on their Dinosaur Tour in 2019.
“I bought a banjo to keep myself busy during lockdown.”
How did the banjo come into your life?
It happened during lockdown in 2020. At the time, I was playing a few solo shows. I bought a banjo to keep myself busy, discovered the clawhammer technique and immersed myself in Appalachian folk music. I wrote a repertoire to take back on the road as a solo performer, and that’s when I composed songs such as Doulancienne, for example…
And then came Blob & Filsonne…
Yes, that duo drew me back to electric guitar after several years exploring folk music. Electric guitar took centre stage again, along with singing and lyrics. Over the past ten years, my repertoire has gone in several directions, from acoustic to electric, instrumental music to songs, playing solo, as a duo or as a trio under different stage names. And some of those songs eventually found their way onto the album with Paul Personne.
What records are you listening to these days?
Right now, I’ve been playing the latest Bon Iver album, Fable, Sable, a lot on my virtual turntable. I admire his work and some of the songs really move me. I also love Khruangbin with Leon Bridges, and I still listen to country and bluegrass artists like Billy Strings or Sierra Ferrell, and old-time banjo played by Rhiannon Giddens. There’s also The Pogues and plenty of Irish tunes, which feed my little banjo obsession!
I could also mention Adrianne Lenker and Courtney Barnett, an Australian artist I really like. Bluesmen such as R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough are never far from my playlists, nor is Malian musician Boubacar Traoré. I love that raw, stripped-down approach, like John Lee Hooker‘s style.
I tend to become obsessed with particular artists. It can last a week, a season or several years, and they stay with me for life, even if I return to them less often after exploring all their recordings and films. I’ve had that with Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Chet Baker, Jimi Hendrix and many others.
The three music films that made the biggest impression on me at fifteen or sixteen were A Film About Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii and Woodstock.
And what place does the blues have in the music you write?
African-American blues, Malian blues and British blues boom music (Peter Green is my favourite) are my home, my foundation. When I write, I don’t really think about it: it’s emotional, that’s for sure, so the blues comes through in my compositions whatever I do. I hear it in so many styles, beyond Robert Johnson, Skip James or Muddy Waters, who codified it, drawing on gospel. It has evolved and taken on many forms. It’s a universal state of mind that goes beyond the pentatonic scale and twelve-bar structures. It can be desperate and melancholic just as much as energetic and positive, and it transcends borders and cultures.
Let’s go back to Blob & Filsonne. How did that project begin?
It’s a duo I formed three or four years ago with my friend Pierrem Thinet, also known as Blob, who plays the viola. We were supposed to perform a concert in a chapel in the south of France. Instead of going down the folk route, he suggested an electric, entirely instrumental repertoire, with compositions about space and the cosmos. We each worked on effects and loops on our own: he used Ableton, while I used traditional effects pedals for live performance. The result is quite atmospheric, psychedelic and experimental, but it remains melodic and leaves room for improvisation.
How did that repertoire develop into an album, and where will people be able to hear you play?
On the album, the sound became harder, with more rock and electronic elements. Our album Souvenirs des Contrées Galactiques was released in March 2025. We were fortunate to have the support of the Lyon-based label Adieu Berthe. We invited Paul Personne to play on Retour dans la Stratosphère, a seven-minute guitar explosion, and our friend Théo Charaf (who is also on Adieu Berthe, with Nitebirds) to play on Rocher en Exil, which closes the record.
We’ll be playing as a duo in Geneva on November 19 for a public radio session with Radio Vostok. We’re starting to think about another album, if our respective schedules allow it. We love playing this repertoire because it gives us complete creative freedom.
“I never imagined I’d get to experience that. It was a childhood dream.”
Jérémy, you shared the stage with your father around the time of Coup d’blues. What do you remember about those concerts and your musical connection on stage?
I have wonderful memories of it. First there was recording the tracks Vue hier soir, Sam’di soir sacré and Big blues for the album, which was an amazing experience at Studio Guillaume Tell in Suresnes. Then Paul Personne invited me to join him on stage for the 2003 to 2006 tour, organised by Alain Lahana. Those were extraordinary moments. I never imagined I’d get to experience that. It was a childhood dream. I was the young kid in the band back then. A fantastic team and some great musical moments on stage. The schedule was intense and I loved it! I’d already played plenty of gigs, but this was a whole new level: my first time at the Olympia in Paris, the main stage at Vieilles Charrues and lots of other remarkable festivals and venues.
Initially, you were supposed to work with your father as artistic director. At what point did the project become an album by the two of you?
Actually, it was the other way around! I used to jokingly call Paul Personne my “artistic director” because he was helping me put an album and a live set together. He’d come to see me wherever I was playing and give me constructive feedback. Then we booked some studio time, but it wasn’t always available and we ran into technical problems, so we carried on recording at my place and then in his home studio. We got ourselves a good audio interface and borrowed some microphones.
How did you decide to bring your songs together on a single record?
It happened gradually. We weren’t calculating anything; we were just trying to make good songs and ideas kept flowing. We thought we’d end up with two separate albums and guest appearances on each other’s records, but the Verycords label encouraged us to trim things down and release a father-and-son album. We produced and recorded everything ourselves over the winter, then Nicolas Quéré (who has worked with Jean-Louis Aubert and the Arctic Monkeys, among others) mixed it, and Mickael Rangeard mastered it in early summer 2026. Everything came together quite easily.
When you’re working on a song together, how do you go about it, particularly when it comes to making your two guitars work together?
We started out with my songs, but Paul Personne soon brought his own touch to the lyrics, the compositions and the arrangements, and later contributed entire songs of his own. We even kept some parts from his demos or mine, recorded on a digital eight-track. Dividing up the guitar parts happened naturally. Whenever one of us heard something, he’d play it. It was a bit like, if you’ve got the idea, you play it! Everything gradually fell into place. Sometimes we had to clear things out and make choices because there were guitars everywhere! We kept what served the music and the song.
And how did you divide up the other instruments and the vocals?
Paul Personne handled more of the percussion and drums, while I played most of the bass parts and did the programming. He sings most of the lead vocals, but on tracks like Doulancienne we sing together, as well as doing all the backing vocals, which we sometimes had fun doubling or tripling.
Some lyrics were originally written in English and then adapted into French. Was singing in French a requirement?
At first I was working on an album that was half in French and half in English. Paul Personne encouraged me to write in French. I had a few lyrics already, we sorted through them and he adapted or translated some of them quite spontaneously. He also had quite a few of his own.
“Doulancienne was written in French from the outset.”
Doulancienne is the first track you’ve released. How did that song come about?
That one came straight out in French. It was originally a banjo blues, and the lyrics came to me almost in one go. Of course, I refined it, played it live quite a lot, and it evolved. I wanted the chorus to have a Cajun feel, but the rhythm is closer to Delta blues.
How did you go from that banjo blues to the version we hear on the album?
For the album, I replaced the banjo with rhythm guitar and Paul Personne added lead guitar on his legendary ES-340. Its out-of-phase pickup gives it that sound I love from his mid-1980s albums Exclusif and Barjoland. It was like a sound from my childhood coming back. We sang the whole song together in one or two takes.
This project began during a difficult time for your family, following Gloria’s death. What role did playing and making music together take on in your daily lives?
It became a huge part of our lives. Gloria passed away in early 2025, followed not long afterwards by dear friends. It was a very difficult year, that’s true. We gradually threw ourselves completely into music, which has always been a healer. There was nothing else to do.
Now that the album is finished, I feel it’s the culmination, or a concentration, of the emotions of a lifetime, both long past and very recent. Our lives, which are like so many others, with their traumas, rebirths and ghosts.
After that first single, what can you tell us about the other tracks on the album?
All I can say is that all the lyrics are in French! There are acoustic folk songs with just a voice, and others with much fuller arrangements. Overall, it’s a pretty laid-back record. Last winter, we were both listening to a lot of J. J. Cale, Hope Sandoval (singer with Mazzy Star) and Fleetwood Mac albums like Future Games and Then Play On. Those have always been favourites of mine, and I think of Paul Personne‘s too, as well as influences. In any case, we were always heading towards a more intimate album rather than something loud and showy.
How would you like to bring Sous le ciel to the stage?
No idea, but we’d love to!
Photos: © Marie-Zoé Legendre.