Chanson singer finds her (French) voice in SoCal

By JIM TRAGESER - Staff Writer | Wednesday, August 27, 2008 10:27 AM PDT ∞

Her father is French, and she was raised in the suburbs of Paris ---- so the fact that Jessica Fichot sings chansons ---- French for songs ---- is natural, right?

Well, the fit might be perfect, but the route to finding it was hardly direct.

"I've been writing songs for a very long time," Fichot said by phone from her Los Angeles home earlier this week, where she was preparing for a show at the La Jolla Pannikin on Friday. "I've always had an itch to record my own music. It was just really hard for me to find a style that works for me. I can write in a lot of different styles, but none of them worked for me."

After graduating from high school in France, Fichot was admitted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston. While she had found that she was able to impress classmates in Paris by performing in English, the opposite happened in Boston ---- where singing in French made her seem "exotic," she said. Chanson typically refers to lyrically driven cabaret-style songs and was popularized by Edith Piaf a half-century ago.

Since graduating from Berklee and moving to Los Angeles four years ago, Fichot has earned a living writing music for children's educational videos. While she enjoys that work, she was feeling a void in terms of finding her own muse.

And after trying a variety of different styles, it was only when she rediscovered the chanson that she felt at home musically.

It was in Los Angeles that she began writing songs in French, Fichot said.

"I heard some Latin American artists, and that inspired me to rediscover the French."

She learned accordion as part of her immersion in chanson, and last year released her first CD, "Le Chemin" ("The Path"). While most of the record is in the style of chanson, she also includes one song in Mandarin in honor of her mother's Chinese heritage, even though she never learned to speak Mandarin.

"I wrote it in French, then I had my mom translate it and I learned it phonetically," Fichot explained. "I actually sing in many languages I don't speak." (She listed Russian and Portuguese as being among those languages.)

While her main job continues to be composing the music for children's videos, Fichot said she is trying to put as much time and effort into her own music as possible. She just returned from a 10-day West Coast tour, and has been playing shows in the Los Angeles area, putting together a regular band.

And while she's had native French speakers come to her shows, what she hasn't done is perform in a French-speaking area such as Quebec or France.

"I only started writing in French two years ago. It's been hard to justify playing shows that far away from home. There's a lot of obstacles to me doing it soon. There are a lot of great chanson singers in France already.

"But I think it will happen."

Jessica Fichot

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Where: Pannikin, 7467 Girard Ave., La Jolla

Cost: $5

Info: (858) 454-5453 or jessicasongs.com

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