My name is May Kershaw, and I am in a band called Black Country, New Road. I play the piano, sing and play a little accordion in the band, and this year I’ve also started learning the organ.

Popeye asked if I would write a 4 part blog on my songwriting process, which stemmed from an interview with NYLON magazine where I said that I wanted to “write 10 great songs in the next five years.” I think it’s been about a year since I made this brash statement and also over a year since I made what I would consider to be my last great song. I feel like this mindset has not been helpful to my creativity and I don’t feel on track to complete 10 great songs in the next four years. At this point I feel like just finishing 10 songs, great or not, is a challenge enough.

Trying to write is a part of my routine when I am back home from touring.

I got back on the 1st of November after a three week tour around Europe. The last two years we’ve toured around Europe in autumn on a sleeper bus. It’s nice waking up in a new city every morning, each new city at a different stage of the changing season. One day the leaves are still green, the next the leaves have all gone, the next day the leaves are back on, turning yellow.

Often, when I am away from home, I feel very inspired to start different projects and have ideas for songs, but when I get back home I find the ideas fizzle into inaction.

One idea for a song I had came to me when I was in Brussels, towards the end of the tour. I was having a coffee and sandwich in a cafe, reading a book called The Years by Annie Ernaux. The book is based around the narrator/ author’s passage through time in France, spanning from 1941 to 2006, a blend between an autobiography and of a changing France through this time. It was raining in Brussels that morning, and while reading this book in the cafe I started to think about the wet socks I was wearing.

Before going on tour, my sister and I were going through our sock collection. She was moving back to London and I was going away on tour so inevitably we were both wanting to take as many socks as we could possibly get our hands on. As we were sorting through the socks we came across these blue socks, and we fought over them- both claiming ownership. I managed to somehow wangle them into my suitcase and I was wearing them that rainy day in Brussels.

These socks have a name tag, and I have always found it endearing to see Samuel Kershaw stitched into them. These were my grandfather’s socks. Perhaps strange to have socks passed on from father to son to daughter, however my granddad liked good quality clothing so these socks are still in great condition.

Anyway as I was reading this book, a thought popped into my head- why did the socks have a name tag stitched in? I wondered if it was a unique family habit to stitch all their names into every small article of clothing, or could it be that these socks were from when my grandad, as a younger man, worked on the ships passing from Liverpool to New York? If so, that would mean these socks would have seen around 65 years of the world unfolding- the same number of years covered in Ernaux’s book.

I had this moment where I thought this would be a great song and wrote about it in my notebook.

A week later I was home, sat at the piano, face to face with my scrawled notes ‘Samuel Kershaw’s Socks’. It dawned on me, while speaking to my mum about this blog, that the reason the name tags were in the socks was probably for when he went into a nursing home during the last few years of his life. I realised the sailor-like tune I had in my head from the POV of the socks was certainly inappropriate. It also made a lot more sense as to why these socks were still in wearable condition. I have put this idea aside for now and started working on two different ideas which I will try to develop, and hopefully will share in this blog.