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?
Damian smiled and said… maybe.
But what stayed with me wasn’t only the “maybe.” It was the way he talked about songwriting.
He said he was interested in writing about things—about people, events and stories. Not only turning inward and writing about himself. He mentioned Tom Waits and the way he writes about everyday moments, larger ideas and sometimes love, always looking outward and finding something interesting in the world.
That conversation came back to me when I first saw King on the Sweet Chaos track list.
I immediately wondered:
Is this the Henry song?
After listening to it, I don’t think it is. But the song still makes me think about Henry and what it really meant to be a king.
Before we dive into the song itself, we should also talk about how King came together.
During the Sweet Chaos album launch tour, Damian explained that King is a collaboration between him and Guy Chambers. Damian had already written the lyrics, while Guy had several tunes in hand. Damian listened to them and chose the one that ultimately became King.
I don’t know enough about the music industry to say how common this particular kind of co-writing is, but collaboration is very familiar to me from academia. Co-authorship can bring together different perspectives and strengths until the finished work becomes much more than the sum of its individual parts.
And I think that is exactly what happened with King.
Damian’s lyrics give the song its mysterious story, striking images and emotional depth. Guy’s music creates the atmospheric, theatrical world around those words. Together, they produced a very cool song!
King opens in a grand, almost storybook world with marble, pillars, golden halls and a heavenly view. It is a beautiful place, carefully built to impress whoever will occupy it.
Someone is being encouraged to believe that he is destined for greater things. Although he may be crawling now, one day he will fly. Nothing will be able to stop him.
It sounds hopeful. Encouraging. Even tender.
Then everything changes.
The king is shown Elysium, but then walls are built around him.
Elysium is paradise in ancient Greek mythology—a place of perfect happiness reserved for heroes and those favored by the gods. So they show the man in the song paradise. They promise him heaven. They raise him above everyone else… And then they confine him inside it.
The idea repeats until it begins to feel like the heart of the song. Everything built to elevate this person also traps him. The pillars are beautiful, but they hold everything rigidly in place. The golden halls are magnificent, but they also confine him inside a life he may not have chosen—or may once have chosen without understanding its cost.
Suddenly, being a king doesn’t feel like freedom at all.
The song then shifts from “you” to “him.” We move from someone being encouraged and lifted up to someone we are watching from the outside.
Someone admired. Elevated. And completely alone. He can still see the sky and the stars, but he can’t reach them. That seems to be the tragedy at the heart of King.
So no, I don’t believe the song is about Henry VIII. But real kings were probably just as alone and bound by their positions as the king in this song.
Kings were surrounded by power, wealth and ceremony, yet bound by duty, politics and the expectations of the crown.
I still think about a moment in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light—the book, not the television series—when Henry VIII reflects on Rafe Sadler, a common man who could marry for love.
A king could not do that.
Royal marriages were matters of state, arranged to produce heirs and secure political alliances. A common man might be free to follow his heart. A king was not.
That is certainly another kind of wall.
But then what kind of king is Damian singing about?
Reading through the comments on Damian’s Instagram post, I noticed several people mentioning David Bowie. I didn’t catch it during my first few listens, but once it was pointed out, it made complete sense.
Bowie created theatrical, almost otherworldly worlds, and so much of his work explored identity, fame and isolation—often through characters who appeared larger than life but remained deeply alone.
That is exactly what King captures: the experience of being elevated and transformed into something larger than yourself, and then becoming trapped inside that very image.
Perhaps the influence isn’t accidental. Damian has spoken about Bowie before, and he and Alison Mosshart recently attended the premiere of the immersive David Bowie: You’re Not Alone exhibition in London. Besides, Damian’s music publishing company is called Thin Red Duke. It is hard not to think of Bowie’s Thin White Duke, that cool, distant and almost aristocratic persona.
The Bowie connection also supports another possible reading of King: that it could be about fame and the loneliness that can accompany it.
A famous person can become a kind of modern king—elevated, admired and surrounded by people, yet separated from ordinary life. The public, the press and the industry create an image around that person. Eventually, that image can become another set of walls.
Elvis Presley may be the clearest example—and it feels especially appropriate to mention him here because Damian is such an Elvis fan.
Elvis was literally called the King. From the outside, he appeared to have everything: fame, money, adoration and the power to command any stage in the world. Yet he was also increasingly restricted by the contracts, financial arrangements and management decisions surrounding him.
For years, Colonel Tom Parker kept extending Elvis’s Las Vegas residencies. What began as an exciting return to live performance gradually became a repetitive and exhausting cycle. Elvis was the star, but he often seemed more like an employee of the enormous business built around him.
Even when Elvis wanted to pursue different creative opportunities or perform outside the United States, his choices were constrained. The King had become too valuable to be allowed to decide freely what the King wanted to do. He was the King, but his hands were tied.
Elvis had the palace, the golden halls and the adoring crowds—but he was also lonely, controlled and confined. Being the King did not make him free; the throne itself became part of the trap.
Perhaps King is about the price of allowing someone else to help make you a star. They recognize your potential, open doors and show you Elysium—but as they guide you towards success, they also begin to take control.
That reading makes the song feel almost like a warning: Be careful who builds your palace, because they may also be building the walls.
And this is where I begin to wonder whether King could be based, at least partly, on Damian’s own experience.
Of course, as he made clear during the online pre-release listening party, Damian never tells us the entire story behind a song. He may begin with a line, an image, another person’s story or something that happened in his own life and then transform it into something completely different. So this is simply my imagination – my interpretation.
After the success of Band of Brothers, Damian suddenly found himself being presented as Hollywood’s next big star. He went on to make Dreamcatcher, an ambitious Lawrence Kasdan film based on a Stephen King novel. The project had an acclaimed director, a major studio and a cast that included Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee and Timothy Olyphant.
From the outside, it must have looked as though Damian had reached the top of the hill.
Hollywood was calling. A major film and the promise of stardom were waiting. He was being told that he was going to fly.
Although Dreamcatcher would ultimately become a critical and commercial disappointment, Damian’s feelings about Hollywood went deeper than the fate of this film. He has spoken honestly about how uncomfortable and isolated he felt while trying to break into the American film industry.
During his Times Talks interview in London in 2014, he described that early experience of Hollywood as “bloated and slightly corrupting.” Rather than finding glamour, he became disillusioned with the corporate machinery and superficiality surrounding the business. He couldn’t connect with the lifestyle, and he missed the grounded, community-driven world of British theatre. Eventually, as he put it, he “ran away” and returned to Britain.
He went back to theatre and to the kind of work that had formed him as an actor. He chose creating over chasing the Hollywood version of success.
I’m not suggesting that King is literally about Damian’s time in Hollywood. But the emotional connection is difficult to ignore. Damian knows what it is like to be promised stardom—and to discover that the glamorous world presented as Elysium may not feel like paradise once you are living inside it.
Here’s Damian performing King in an acoustic set at Rough Trade East in London during his Sweet Chaos album launch tour. He recommends bourbon on the rocks for this one, and it makes perfect sense. This is not a song you rush. You sit with it.
Smooth at first…
And then it hits.
I said it at the beginning, and after all these listens, I’m even more convinced: King is the coolest song Damian has ever written.
Oh, and one final detail I love: the King single cover was created by Damian’s daughter Manon, who is an artist. The figure featured on the cover is someone she calls “Mr. Yellow.”
Damian also recently revealed during an interview with BBC Radio Scotland that Manon will be attending the Glasgow School of Art this fall. Congratulations, Manon! We can’t wait to see where your artistic journey takes you. You can follow her art page, @manonmccoryart, on Instagram.
You can listen to or order Damian Lewis’ album Sweet Chaos here.
And if you would like to hear King live—and I certainly do—you can find Damian’s UK tour dates and tickets here.
