Damian Lewis’ Song of the Week: King

Welcome back, everyone, to another Damian Lewis Song of the Week!

This week, we’re diving into King, possibly the coolest song Damian has ever written. So, let’s go!

Two years ago, when I sat down with Damian backstage, I asked him something I had been wondering for a while:

Would he ever write a song about Henry VIII?

At the time, he had just finished filming Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, so it didn’t feel like a stretch. Damian had already shown how he could take stories and characters from his acting work and turn them into songs. Never Judge a Man by His Umbrella was inspired by A Spy Among Friends and the story of Kim Philby, while Fix Me Up—formerly Suck My Blood—came out of The Radleys.

So why not Henry? Continue reading “Damian Lewis’ Song of the Week: King”

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things About Damian’s Gigs!

Omeara, London, August 4, 2022

At the Sweet Chaos album-launch shows in June, a few people told me they had bought tickets after reading my posts about Damian’s earlier gigs. I was so flattered! Writing these diaries lets me share evenings I love with people who couldn’t be there. To hear that they had also encouraged someone to go and experience the music themselves made me very happy.

I’ve been to 16 of Damian’s gigs—23 if you count the acoustic sets. Yes, I love the guy. Yes, I’m biased. But I wouldn’t keep boarding trains, booking hotel rooms, and crossing the Atlantic on a red-eye flight if I weren’t having so much fun!

There have been train strikes, soaking rain, very little sleep, and even a lost passport. There have also been wonderful songs, brilliant musicians, old friends, new friends, and evenings that stayed with me long after I got home. Continue reading “These Are a Few of My Favorite Things About Damian’s Gigs!”

Damian Lewis’ Song of the Week: Question Mark

“Gonna start with a gentle little love song called ‘Question Mark.’” — Damian Lewis

Welcome back, everyone, to another Song of the Week!

This week, we are turning to one of the quietest and most mysterious songs on Sweet Chaos.

“Question Mark” is a beautiful ballad set in a moonlit bedroom. A man watches the woman he loves as she sleeps, her body twisted in the sheets. He knows her intimately, yet some part of her remains a mystery.

Damian has never identified the woman who inspired the song. But songs contain clues, and once we connect “Question Mark” to an earlier song, “Soho Tango,” those clues begin to tell a very familiar love story.

At least, that is how I hear it.

But before we get into all that, readers can catch up with our previous Song of the Week posts here. You can listen to or order Sweet Chaos here. And you can get tickets for Damian’s upcoming Sweet Chaos UK tour here.

Now, let’s go!

Continue reading “Damian Lewis’ Song of the Week: Question Mark”

Happy 15th Birthday, Homeland (Or How Brody Turned My Life Upside Down)

Prologue

At a recent dinner party, we played a game where everyone had to talk about three things they thought changed their lives. I had two moments from my early life: one being the Live Aid concert back in July 1985 (I was 13!) that got me thrilled that the whole world, all of us, were watching it together, and the other was a political assassination of a journalist in Turkey in January 1992 (I was 20!) that taught me that a state can get rid of its citizens who insist on looking for the truth. And the third moment I mentioned was Homeland. Because I was a regular academic attending to my own thing until a certain “pesky Brit” disguised as an American POW showed up and turned everything upside down! Homeland made me a Damian Lewis fan for life and I launched a blog in his name almost a decade ago. Go, figure!

Homeland, the show that started it all, premiered on Showtime on October 2, 2011, exactly fifteen years ago today. Continue reading “Happy 15th Birthday, Homeland (Or How Brody Turned My Life Upside Down)”

Damian Lewis’ Song of the Week: Grey at the Temple

“I wrote this because I just started forgetting shit.”

-Damian Lewis (introducing “Grey at the Temple” at Subscription Rooms in Stroud, UK)

Hello! It is Damian Lewis’ Song of the Week time again!

This week’s choice is one of the shortest and sweetest songs on Sweet Chaos: “Grey at the Temple.”

At only one minute and 54 seconds, it is almost over before you are ready to let it go. It sounds like a little folk song, with a gentle melody that makes you smile. But underneath that sweetness is something everyone around Damian’s age—and mine—will understand: the unsettling realization that our memories are not quite what they used to be.

 Unlike some of the songs on Sweet Chaos, “Grey at the Temple” does not require much decoding. Damian’s introduction in Stroud, quoted at the beginning of this essay, made its inspiration very clear. Continue reading “Damian Lewis’ Song of the Week: Grey at the Temple”