Can't read the Cromwell interview 
How did your Mark Knopfler chapter begin?
Well, that was 1995. Mark had been coming and going to Nashville for a few years to interact with Chet Atkins and do stuff with him. He was on the heals of the [1991] On Every Street record. That was the last Dire Straits record. He was ready to move on with his career. He didn’t want to do Dire Straits any longer. He felt it was time for a change.
He started recording and interacting with Nashville session guys. He did several different sessions with different combinations of players. And then he found the rhythm section that became what we affectionally called the Ninety-Sixers. That was a pet name for our first tour together. [Keyboardist] Guy Fletcher from Dire Straits was also part of it.
The very first record we did was all Nashville-based guys, called Golden Heart. We met at a studio called Emerald Sound. We started cutting Golden Heart and it was just instant band. It felt so great. We became fast friends and were having a ball together. That started a 10-year run with him.
Dire Straits was this massive band. He could have just called this new thing Dire Straits and continued to play stadiums. The lineup always changed a ton anyway and nobody cared. But clearly he wanted to massively downscale.
Yeah. He wanted to separate and distance himself from arena/stadium rock & roll. He wanted to get back to the intimacy of writing songs and telling stories and having the ability to do that in infinite environments.
A decision like that is very rare in rock since it meant making a lot less money.
Yeah. But when a guy has sold over 100 million records and he’s the sole writer on every song, I don’t think he has to worry about whether or not he’s going to make his rent. I think it really became a matter of creative control. It was also a matter of his family life where he wanted to maybe redirect his energies to accommodate for them as well.
How was he a different sort of bandleader than Neil Young?
Completely different. Neil is pure instinct. He captures lighting in a bottle. And even if it cracks the bottle, it still caught the lightning, so it’s awesome. It might be a shitty performance of the song, but it’s a perfect delivery of the vocal and the lyric, which is what matters.
Mark is different. Mark is more deliberate about the performance of the music and the subtleties of the music and the dynamics and control of notes and interaction of all the different musicians involved. It’s a much slower, deliberate, drawn-out process. It probably leans more towards the high-fi end of production.
I love all the records, but Sailing to Philadelphia is a real favorite of mine. There’s a magic to that record.
That’s a great record, man. We cut that at a place called the Tracking Room in Nashville. That’s just a beautiful record, a real beauty.
During the concerts, there were brief moments where he’d do “Sultans of Swing” or his old arena-rock thing, but they were brief, almost the bare minimum.
I think he did that as an homage to his audience. Most people that go see him perform want to hear songs that changed their lives. If that happens to be “Money for Nothing,” but he doesn’t want to sing that, there are days where we’d go, “You know what, man? You gotta do that. You gotta give the people what they’ve given you.” That’s just the way it goes.
I think he serviced that as long as he could. I’m pretty far out of touch with Mark now. I don’t know what he’s doing with his recording and live performing. I can only relate to my time with him. I know that where we started on Golden Heart and where I dropped off at the end of my tenure with him, he had transitioned considerably in the direction of more of a folk songwriter kind of guy than a rock & roll guy.
You left the 2005 tour during the tour. What happened there?
That was personal things that were going on in my life that needed pretty intense attention. It was family-related. It wasn’t music-related. There were some professional issues that were unfortunate, but none of them would I ever direct to Mark. Mark was great. I still love Mark. But I needed to take a break during that tour.
The handling of all that got really tricky for me and it came necessary for me to say goodbye at that point. In all fairness to everyone involved, I can’t go too deeply into all that, but that was my jumping-off point.
That same year, 2005, you jump back to Neil Young after 16 years off and cut Prairie Wind.
That’s exactly right. It was right on the heels of that. A lot of people think I quit Mark so I could go play with Neil. That wasn’t the case. Neil had actually contacted me about recording while I was on tour with Mark. I just said, “I can’t do it, man. I can’t do it.” He moved on and started recording Prairie Wind [with Karl Himmel on drums]. When I left the tour, shortly thereafter, Neil decided to resume the recording again and Long Grain [Ben Keith] was aware of the fact that I was back in Nashville. Then he said, “Neil has come to town. Can you come record?” I said, “Of course I can. I’m here.”
