Roads feature in many of Knopfler’s songs, partly because he has been a touring minstrel for so long, but also because the highway is such an inexhaustible metaphor for life (‘A million miles our vagabond heels / Clocked up beneath the clouds’). It is no surprise that the cover of his 2018 album, Down The Road Wherever, depicts an arrow-straight interstate, tapering to a flat American horizon. Listening to the music, you feel that Knopfler is constantly glancing back to see how far he has travelled, or else looking up ahead to the next lonely billboard or way-marker.
‘That’s absolutely right,’ he says. ‘I’ve just been recording some stuff for a little EP, and roads run through all those nursery rhymes.’
Nice, can't wait for this EP!