Mark Knopfler: Sultan of Song
By Jon Hersey
Songwriters today face a massive problem, or so it seems. The vast majority of popular songs are love songs or some variant—a trend that has been building for a thousand years or more, at least since 11th-century troubadours swooning about courtly love were all the rage. And from the Beatles to Taylor Swift, it’s common for modern artists to release whole albums virtually confined to the subject of romance. So, how can anyone argue with the common refrain, among musicians and critics alike, that “it’s all been done before”?
If you’re Swift, the answer is to come up with ever more out-there metaphors. Her latest release features a track likening her beloved to an alien who abducted her, then left her naked in a field.
Another option is to opt out. Indeed, Sara Bareilles showed that doing so explicitly—singing “I’m not gonna write you a love song ’cause you asked for it, ’cause you need one”—can itself make for a wonderful and successful song. Not that there’s anything wrong with love songs, of course. But among the greatest musical innovators are those who have seen that there’s a whole world out there beyond the changing weather of one’s heart. Undoubtedly at the top of that list, in terms of both artistic and commercial achievement, is Mark Knopfler, whose Billboard chart-topping hits, funny enough, have all been about musicians—or about people talking about musicians.
Knopfler’s outside-the-box success certainly has something to do with his unique pedigree.
Like many of history’s notable novelists—Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and more—one of Knopfler’s first jobs was as a newspaper reporter, a role like no other for attuning one’s ear to attention-grabbing stories and telling details. And for three years, while his band Dire Straits was in its infancy, he paid the bills by lecturing on English at Loughton College. Surely, teaching students about the language and its master practitioners didn’t detract from his efforts to conjure believable characters and novel situations in the span of radio-friendly pop songs.
The band’s first major hit, “Sultans of Swing,” was not only one of the all-time greatest guitar songs. It managed to sketch out a cast the likes of which most could never have imagined appearing in a multiplatinum-selling song: amateur musicians going nowhere fast but enjoying their time in the local spotlight. Knopfler’s journalistic attention to his surroundings was most handsomely rewarded when he wrote a song about an appliance retailer he’d overheard talking about the posh life of rock stars. However unexpectedly, “Money for Nothing” paved the way for a more than 230-show world tour, so breakneck and exhausting that it ultimately contributed to the band’s demise.
But in the forty years since that song showed how unique (and unromantic) a hit can be, Knopfler has continued honing his craft, writing ten movie soundtracks and another ten full-length albums. In the first three months of 2024 alone, he put out an instrumental single (“Going Home”), a new album (One Deep River), and a brilliant four-song EP (The Boy).
“Going Home” is the theme he wrote for the 1983 film Local Hero. Knopfler rerecorded it—with contributions from more than sixty of today’s biggest names in music, including more than fifty top-tier guitarists—to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust. It features Ringo Starr on drums, and the animated video for the song indicates whose guitar parts are whose, crediting everyone from Hank Marvin (one of Knopfler’s earliest inspirations) and the late greats Duane Eddy and Jeff Beck, to Steve Lukather, Tony Iommi, Eric Clapton, and Joe Bonamassa. Amazingly, despite the dozens of guitarists, the track remains musical, perhaps overindulging only in length at more than ten minutes.1
Standout tracks on Knopfler’s new full-length album, One Deep River, include “Scavenger’s Yard” and “Tunnel 13”—both convincing portraits of schemers and thieves—and perhaps most moving, “Sweeter Than the Rain,” an ode to those whose often unsavory job is to bring such bandits to justice. Sparse and pensive, like the mind of a man whose only companions are his horse and his gun, this last tells the tale of an Old West vigilante tasked with throwing out society’s trash:
If you should hearken to the devil’s bidding
Perchance you’ll bring me work to do
It may not be my heart’s true calling
But I will surely come for you
To you who live by rape and plunder
I’ll shoot or hang with scant remorse
My Old Reliable the avenging thunder
Else my rope and faithful horse
Your late companion in haste repented
I had him take a ride with me
Through this poor country he had so tormented
Until we came to the highest tree
Also moving is “Black Tie Jobs.” Pulling from Knopfler’s reporter days (as he’s done before, particularly effectively with “Basil”), it conveys, in a few short minutes, the unhappy lot of an obituary writer.
Stretching the palette of subjects ever further, Knopfler is at the height of his game with his latest release, the four-song EP The Boy. Unveiled on Record Store Day, it gives four different perspectives on, of all things, boxing (a topic Knopfler has likewise written beautifully about in “Broken Bones”). The depth of characters and breadth of stories make it easy to mistake for a TV-show soundtrack. Complete with the sounds of cheering crowds and fifties-era flashbulbs, the opener, “Mr. Solomons Said,” tells of a boxer-turned-informant for Solomons, apparently a sly, powerful talent scout who made a fortune betting on fights.
Daytimes I’ll make the rounds
In every caff and every pub in this part of town
There’s a mug or a pug
And always someone blathering
It’s gossip calypso all day long
Who’s the money going on
Who’s been training wrong
Got hurt or struggling
Well I might have a couple with a cornerman
The one with the sponge and bucket
I’ve maybe got a bottle for a club doorman
Tickets for a waitress in my pocket
“The Boy” is the sad story of a father whose son left early to join the sport, lured by money and pomp, to make his living punching and being punched. With bagpipe-inspired fiddle and guitar lines, “All Comers” is the most upbeat of the four, glimpsing the old-time fairground practice of allowing challengers from the crowd to step into the ring with a professional boxer. Those still on their feet after three rounds got paid.
“The thing is,” Knopfler says of his craft, “if you’ve energized somebody . . . or you’ve sensitized somebody, you’ve made a difference.” In a body of work spanning nearly five decades, the Sultan of Song has continued to do just that: sensitizing listeners to the drama of the oft overlooked. “It’s a creative act,” he says, “you drop it in the well. The ripples go out and you never know what’s going to come back.” What’s come back in his case is a resounding “no” to the idea that “it’s all been done before.”2