If you are a Rock ‘n’ Roll fan, you would know that when it comes to raw talent, very few can outshine Mark Knopfler. And the four-time Grammy winning singer, songwriter and guitarist says that the process of making music is still a mystery to him.
From his first track for the legendary band Dire Straits that disbanded in 1995 to his eight albums as a solo artiste, he still finds it thrilling. “It would appear that there are a lots of possibilities with music — eight notes in an octave — but boy, it’s amazing what you can do with them, and of course the ideas are inexhaustible… and the combinations!
“And sometimes of course, you’ll want the thing to be distilled into something that’s familiar. Your ideas could come from anywhere, but then you might want to distil them into something really, really simple, into three chords and hopefully the truth,” says the 65-year-old music legend.
From his track Sailing to Philadelphia, a song about Jeremiah Dixon and Charles Mason who were exploring the West for opportunities, to his recent track Basil, a song about the poet Basil Hunting, Mark always tells a story. Basil, for example, is about a man from the time when Mark worked as a copy boy.
“When I was 15, I was a copy boy on the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle. There was a chap working there who was different from the others. He was gruff, grumpy, older, and differently dressed from the others. He was Basil Hunting — it was very clear that he’d rather be writing poetry than writing copy for the Evening Chronicle, and that he didn’t really fit. So in a way it was the contrast between him and I,” Mark says, adding, “He fascinated me.”
Mark observes that he has been writing more songs of late and that the older he gets, the more productive he is. “I suppose it’s just that I’m probably spending more time doing it, and it took me a long time to respect the little bit of talent that I’ve got. I think a lot of the time, when you’re young, you’re thinking about other stuff, and you’re bouncing off the walls a bit more.”
Mark feels a lot of his work also depends on the judgement calls made when he records or improvises on stage. “I’m not sure if it is always right and it is the call you made on that day at that place, in the studio at that time — you hope that it was the right one.
“It’s the same thing when you’re standing on stage improvising, you hope it’s going to come off okay... it may not always,” he says.
