Of course everybody on his own, I would never try to coax, but for me it HAS a beautiful theme: it is the story of what Mark often told us, how the music came from the Tyne, going to America and coming back... And of course it is all meant musically, this record is really putting it into geography: It starts in Edinburgh, than we are really travelling with M&D across the ocean... El Macho is the south of America, Wanderlust is the theme itself, Speedway is starting as a little bluegrass and shows the development of the music, especially the second half of the album is breathtakingly americana, great atmospheric album-vibes from track 8 to 11, and it all ends again in Leeds, in the past... Travel, horizon, endurance, sun, dust ..
Oh, I could talk about this album for ages.
But to get back to topic: Shangri-La has an overall theme, too, let's call it "vision" and "dreams", how they come up, how they develop and how they are destroyed, so this album, too, has a theme. But these themes are more expressed by lyrics than by music, whereas the first two Dire Straits albums had more real musical character and "theme".
Whereas "The Ragpicker's Dream"'s theme is "Home". That is what the dream is. And almost every song is about home, about not having it, having to leave it for different reasons (WAM, DGTK), remembering the home in the past (A place where...), do not want to leave it (FTWN, YDKYB). And the
title track itself really shows us the idea in a very almost "cheesy" way: looking through a window on Christmas Eve through the eyes of a rover...
LE
