SINCE DISBANDING DIRE STRAITS, WHICH HE LED FROM 1977 to 1992, Knopfler has evolved from headband-sporting guitar hero to acclaimed observational songwriter. Commencing with his 1996 solo debut Golden Heart (Warner Bros.) and continuing through One Deep River, his just-released 10th solo studio album, on the jazz-centric Blue Note label, Knopfler tells character-focused stories in arrangements that might cause listeners to think he’s from Nashville, not Northumber-land.
Post-Straits songs like “Sailing to Philadelphia” (the Charles Mason/Jeremiah Dixon exploratory history-lesson duet with James Taylor), “Boom, Like That” (a chronicle of America’s mid–20th century fast-food explosion), and “Tunnel 13” (a new track, from One Deep River, about a 1923 train robbery in the Siskiyou Mountains of northern California) have extended the narrative thread laid down in vintage Dire Straits songs like “Romeo and Juliet,” “Telegraph Road,” and “Brothers in Arms”—all Knopfler compositions.1
Knopfler tells stories at the level of myth and legend. “I don’t want to narrow it down for anyone,” Knopfler said in an interview with Stereophile. “Whenever I’ve tried to do that in the past, it seemed that they somehow lost their charm. The more specific you become in answering ‘Was that about this? Was this about that?’—that just seems to make it smaller.”
“Mark is all about the song,” observes audio engineer, producer, and keyboardist Guy Fletcher, Knopfler’s longtime coproducer and sounding board ever since he joined Dire Straits to record the band’s 1985 blockbuster Brothers in Arms.2 “He just wants to immerse you in it and not be flashy about it.” Fletcher’s job is on the technical side of storytelling. “It’s about getting the right atmosphere down for the story at hand. It’s down to great engineering and great mixing.”
Knopfler’s songs are all about story and myth, but his guitar still has plenty to Dion—was working on the latest in his series of collaborative albums on the Keeping the Blues Alive Records label, . Each of the album’s 14 tracks has at least one guest star, most of them great guitarists. “I really didn’t write ‘Dancing Girl’ for Mark Knopfler,” Dion said, “but on the way home from the studio after I finished the song, I was listening to it in my truck, and I wound up thinking, ‘Mark Knopfler’s play on this.’”
