The Dire Straits song where Mark Knopfler found his bliss: “Elements falling into place”
Some of the greatest songs ever made usually tend to fall out of the sky. As much as people might labour for ages trying to get the right track, sometimes being present in the piece at the right time while tape rolls is all it takes for a song to go from drab to amazing.
Mark Knopfler may have had a habit of propping up other artists every time he played, but he thought no other track came together quite like ‘Tunnel of Love’.
That kind of spontaneity is often what separates technically sound songs from truly memorable ones. When musicians allow themselves to follow instinct rather than structure, they can stumble into moments that feel far more organic than anything carefully mapped out in advance.
In those instances, the studio becomes less of a controlled environment and more of a space for discovery. It’s a mindset that suits players like Knopfler perfectly, where feel and intuition often take precedence over rigid songwriting rules.
If you were to look at any Dire Straits song from their career, there’s a good chance many people would wonder what the hell the big deal is. Considering this was the era of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd making bold and daring musical visions every time they came out with new material, Knopfler felt like the guitarist in a band that played down at the pub on Fridays after everyone got off work.
Sure, there wasn’t anything too flashy at first, but the more you listen to how the band is interesting, the more you start to realise what they were all about. Since Knopfler was never known to play with a pick, his use of fingerstyle leads blended the world of country, rock and even pieces of folk music all under one roof on tracks like ‘Sultans of Swing’.
Before they had even gotten to the MTV generation, the band still knew how to ride the trends of the day. Compared to their traditional rock sounds on their debut, Making Movies saw them expanding their craft a lot more, which usually involved a track list that didn’t understand the term “hit single”. Since the six-minute cut of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ was a bit of a tough sell for radio, ‘Tunnel of Love’ was going for more of a groove than a traditional rock song.
It’s strange because Knopfler wasn’t necessarily inspired when putting together the track for the album. For all of the great music that he made a few years before, Knopfler admitted that he wasn’t satisfied with the piece until he brought it to the band, recalling, “There’s a certain part of the song that I call the breakdown… When you get to that state, there’s a strange sense of one thing following another, of elements falling into place quite naturally.”
Listening back to the track, this kind of breakdown doesn’t feel like something that could ever be written out on a page. As opposed to people planning out how long a bridge is supposed to be or when they need to get back to the chorus, this section feels like every member is conversing with each other without using words, instead letting the music carry them somewhere else.
While the track stalled out before making the Top 50, they still honed their craft before exploding into the 1980s. Despite being the least likely band to become photogenic rock stars, songs like ‘Money for Nothing’ would become staples of the MTV generation, featuring long extended outros on the album where the group starts to mess around with the tune. ‘Tunnel of Love’ may not be the most high-profile tune in Dire Straits’ catalogue, but had Knopfler not brought it into the band, there’s a good chance that he would have never made Brothers in Arms.
