Telegraph Road (song)

Infobox Song
Name = Telegraph Road
Artist = Dire Straits
from Album = Love over Gold
Released = 1982
Format =
Recorded =
Genre = Rock
Length = 14:21
Label = Vertigo
Writer = Mark Knopfler

Extra tracklisting
Album = Love over Gold


Type = studio
prev_track =
prev_no =
this_track = "Telegraph Road"
track_no = 1
next_track = "Private Investigations"
next_no = 2

"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.Fact|date=February 2007The coda of the live recording on the 1984 album "Alchemy" features one of the band's most brilliant guitar improvisations.

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, Knopfler focuses on one man's personal struggle with unemployment after the city built around the telegraph road has become uninhabited and barren just as it began.

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." [cite web
url=http://www.knopfler.net/telegraph.html
title=http://www.knopfler.net/telegraph.html]

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 five minute guitar solo that eventually fades out.

References