Lyric writing can sometimes be like drawing blood from a stone. But sometimes the pen just flows. After an amazing trip to the US in June 2014, I realised where the blues really came from. And subsequently, I absorbed via osmosis a little bit of how to write about your home town.

And it’s not just the human rights history that has had the blues as a soundtrack. What I noticed about a lot of US citizens is their ease of conversation. Complete strangers will exchange life stories on a Greyhound between cities, or during the few minutes they’ll spend waiting on a mocha in Starbucks. A kind of call and response, if you will,...