"Telegraph Road" is a song by British rock

Rock music

Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...

 band Dire Straits

Dire Straits

Dire Straits were a British rock band active from 1977 to 1995, composed of Mark Knopfler , his younger brother David Knopfler , John Illsley , and Pick Withers .Dire Straits' sound drew from a variety of musical influences, including jazz, folk, blues, and came closest...

 and written by Mark Knopfler

Mark Knopfler

Mark Freuder Knopfler, OBE is a Scottish-born British guitarist, singer, songwriter, record producer and film score composer. He is best known as the lead guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter for the British rock band Dire Straits, which he co-founded in 1977...

. It appeared on their 1982 album Love over Gold

Love over Gold

Love Over Gold is the fourth album by British rock band Dire Straits.- History :Due to its lengthy atmospheric instrumental passages, the album has been cited as the band's attempt at progressive rock....

. Clocking in at 14:18 minutes long, it is rarely played by radio stations, yet has remained highly regarded over the years.

It was first played live at the opening concert of their "Making Movies" Australian tour (Perth Entertainment Centre, 22 March 1981) as the final encore.

The band played a slightly shorter version of the song on their 1984 album Alchemy: Dire Straits Live

Alchemy: Dire Straits Live

Side twoSide threeSide four-CD release:"Love over Gold", which had been released as a separate single in 1984, was added into the track list for the CD release, and the fade outs between sides 1 and 2 and sides 3 and 4 have been removed...

and a remixed version of that performance was included in their 1988 greatest hits album Money for Nothing

Money for Nothing (album)

Money for Nothing is a greatest hits album by Dire Straits released in 1988. It features highlights from the band's first five albums. The vinyl edition omits "Telegraph Road" and has a different running order, with "Tunnel of Love" placed between "Money for Nothing", the title track, and "Brothers...

. The original studio album version was included as the opening track on The Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler: Private Investigations

The Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler: Private Investigations

The Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler: Private Investigations is a 2005 best of album. Named after their 1982 hit single, it consists of material by Dire Straits, with songs selected from the majority of the group's six studio albums from 1978 up to the group's dissolution in 1995...

.

Interpretation

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

Telegraph Road (Michigan)

In the U.S. state of Michigan, US Highway 24 , also known as Telegraph Road, is a major north–south state trunkline highway; it is mostly divided highway. The total length is approximately and is signed as US 24 in its entirety...

 in suburban Detroit, Michigan

Michigan

Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....

. In the latter verses, Knopfler focuses on one man's personal struggle with unemployment

Unemployment

Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...

 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 10 May 1983, 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

Growth of the Soil

The Growth of the Soil is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.-Theme:...

 [by the Norwegian

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

 author Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun

Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He was praised by King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul....

], 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."

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, followed by a slightly faster guitar solo lasting about five minutes and eventually fading out.