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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 14:21 minutes long, it is rarely 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 1984 album Alchemy 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]
[edit] Composition
The song starts out with a quiet crescendo that lasts almost two minutes, before the song's main theme starts. After the first verse, the main theme plays again, followed by the second verse. After a guitar solo, a short bridge slows the song down to a quiet keyboard portion similar to the intro, followed by a slow guitar solo. Next, the final two verses, with the main theme in between, play. The main theme is played one last time, eventually turning into a four minute guitar solo that eventually fades out.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.knopfler.net/telegraph.html.
