“Sweet thoughts on a shitty day.” — Damian Lewis
Welcome to another Song of the Week!
If you have missed any of our earlier deep dives—or would simply like to revisit them—you can find all our previous Song of the Week posts here.
Today, we are turning to “Traffic Jam”: my favorite song on Sweet Chaos and one I have been waiting to explore properly. And now we have another wonderful reason to talk about it: Damian has released the official video, directed by Sir Ramble and featuring Damian, Petra and one rather beautiful vintage Mercedes.
So, buckle up. It is time to get stuck in Traffic Jam!
When I chose my top three songs from Sweet Chaos, “Traffic Jam” was my number one. I called it wonderfully relatable then, and that is still probably the biggest reason I love it. Who hasn’t had one of those shitty, shitty days when everything seems determined to annoy you?
The dog rolls in fox poo. You lock yourself out. The neighbors get on your nerves. And, of course, you’re stuck in traffic.
That last one is important, because long before Damian wrote “Traffic Jam,” he was already complaining about traffic jams. In a 2010 interview with The Times, when asked what stressed him out, he said:
“Almost everything stresses me out, but sitting in a traffic jam is my idea of hell.”
Seven years later, when the Evening Standard asked what made him angry, bad driving was on the list:
“Makes me crazy!”
And in his Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire that same year, when asked which trait he most disliked in others, he chose selfishness—and offered drivers who block junctions as a perfect example.
So perhaps “Traffic Jam” was inevitable.
But the traffic itself isn’t really why I love the song.
Damian has summed it up perfectly in just six words:
“Sweet thoughts on a shitty day.”
Because that is what gets us through days like this, isn’t it?
Sometimes everything around us is irritating, and we cannot change any of it. We cannot escape the boring meeting, silence the noisy neighbors or magically clear the traffic. But our minds can go somewhere else. We can think of someone we love, remember something wonderful or look forward to something—my own favorite trick.
Those thoughts don’t make the shitty things disappear, but they help carry us through the day. And perhaps that is Sweet Chaos in miniature: chaos all around us, but somewhere inside it, a little sweetness.
There is something else I loved when I first heard Damian perform “Traffic Jam” live—and I confess that I miss it in the album version. The earlier lyrics were more political. Among all the everyday disasters were references to a school shooting and January 6. Both disappeared from the finished song. I don’t know why. Perhaps they felt too specifically American, or perhaps they made the song darker than Damian wanted it to be. But, perhaps predictably for a political person, I liked them.
Here is Damian playing “Traffic Jam” at Cambridge Junction during the second leg of his Mission Creep UK tour in March 2024.
Oh, and then there’s the David Bowie reference.
At the album-launch shows, Damian teased that people who know their music—and even those who don’t—would recognize a musical motif in the song. The reference itself is hardly surprising: Damian has often mentioned Bowie as one of his musical influences.
And confession time: I didn’t get it. So I have no idea which category that puts me in. Those living under a rock, perhaps?
When we put together our collective favorite songs from Sweet Chaos, I openly admitted that the Bowie reference in “Traffic Jam” had gone straight over my head. I was never really a big Bowie fan. I was too busy listening to my boy bands growing up—particularly those Wild Boys from Duran Duran.
Damian has since explained that the song contains a deliberate nod to “Space Oddity,” for which permission was obtained from Bowie’s estate.
Once you know that, the joke makes perfect sense. Major Tom is sitting in his “tin can,” far above the world. In “Traffic Jam,” our narrator is trapped in his rather more earthbound tin can, going absolutely nowhere.
And now we come to perhaps my favorite part.
PETRA!
Petra already had a place in “Traffic Jam,” which made me ridiculously happy. There is something lovely about putting your dog into a song. Years from now, wherever that song travels and whoever listens to it, Petra will still be there.
And now she is in the official video, too.
My heart melts.
And wait…we know that car, too!
The video sent us into full Fan Fun detective mode because that beautiful vintage Mercedes looked very familiar. Last year, the dealer who sold it posted about Damian buying the car, and Manon recently shared an Instagram post featuring it, culminating in photographs from a trip they took.
Those posts make the “Traffic Jam” video particularly intriguing. There is the Mercedes. There is Damian looking very happy during the trip—including a lovely photograph of him in a lake—and now the car has a starring role in the video.
So it certainly seems possible that they made the video during this trip. There are a few clues to play with. In the video, Damian is driving on the left-hand side of the road, suggesting those scenes were filmed in the UK. But one of Manon’s posts from the trip also shows a French map in front of them. Was it connected to their journey, or was it simply a prop for the video?
We don’t know—and we don’t really need to. Half the fun is spotting these little connections between the glimpses of life they share and what eventually appears on screen.
What I love most is how personal the video feels. It doesn’t look as though Damian simply turned up at a studio, stood in front of a camera and made something promotional. His car is there. His dog is there. Little pieces of real life have found their way into the fictional world of the song, just as they often do in Damian’s songwriting.
Maybe that is ultimately why “Traffic Jam” remains my favorite song on Sweet Chaos. It is funny, clever and wonderfully relatable. It has Bowie floating somewhere above it, Petra sitting firmly at its heart and Damian being driven mad by traffic—a particular kind of madness we now know he has been carrying around for years.
But underneath all that fun is a very simple and rather lovely idea: when life becomes irritating—or genuinely awful—our minds can still take us somewhere sweet. To a person, a memory or something we love.
“Traffic Jam” doesn’t pretend those thoughts make the chaos disappear. Sometimes, though, they are enough to carry us through it.
“Sweet thoughts on a shitty day.”
And now we have Damian, Petra and that wonderful old Mercedes bringing it all to life in the official video.
Go watch it.
And if you happen to be stuck in traffic while you do, even better.
