Telegraph Road (song)

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"Telegraph Road" is a song by the British rock band Dire Straits and written by Mark Knopfler. It appeared on their 1982 album Love over Gold. Clocking in at nearly 15 minutes long, it is rarely if ever played by radio stations, yet has remained well-regarded over the years by many fans of the band.^{[citation needed]} The coda of the live recording on the 1988 album Money for Nothing features one of the band's most brilliant guitar improvisations.

[edit] Meaning

Inspired by a bus trip taken by Knopfler, the lyrics narrate a tale of changing land development over a span of many decades along Telegraph Road in Michigan. In the latter verses, the singer focuses on one man's personal struggle with unemployment.

In an interview on RockLine, a "rock radio network" call-in show, broadcast live on May 10, 1993, Mark Knopfler said, while on tour, he... "in fact, was driving down that road, and I was reading a book at the time, called Growth of the Soil [by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun], and I just put the two together. I was driving down this Telegraph Road....and it just went on and on and on forever, it's like what they call linear development. And I just started to think, I wondered how that road must have been when it started, what it must have first been. And then really that's how it all came about yeah, I just put that book together and the place where I was, I was actually sitting in the front of the tour bus, at the time." ^[1]