Dire Straits - Love Over Gold

To continue the theme of things that look like EPs but end up being full concept albums, here's Love Over Gold by Dire Straits. 

Fun fact, Private Dancer was originally intended for Love Over Gold, but Mark Knopfler thought it made more sense if a woman sang it, so he gave (which i jadedly assume means sold) it to Tina Turner. Once you listen to the title track companion piece and the album closer It Never Rains, you'll hear how that all makes sense. 

Telegraph Road literally stretches from Toledo Ohio to the northwest corner of the  Detroit metropolitan area. It's a long-ass road, and it sets the album up as a gloss of the life cycle of a modern industrialized city (more on that later). 

Then we zoom in on the stereotypical jaded/cynical private investigator. 

Zoom back out for Side B, a look at "industrial disease." It's much less unnerving than SPK (the band or the crazy German philosophical movement), but all the salient points are there. 

Then the title track and a final look at the vicissitudes of preferencing material wealth over love. 

Why's everything horrible? Easy, you have to actually choose love over gold. It doesn't magically happen on its own, it's hard work, but you see the consequences of making the wrong choice all around you every day. 

Yes, yes, i know, there's a bit of an overwhelming whiff of Bob Dylan-alike hanging in the air, but i think Mark Knopfler is completely on par with Tom Petty in putting his own personal stamp on the style. 

This definitely is my favorite Dire Straits album, but that's only because i haven't really made any effort to actually listen to their other albums as albums. Regardless, i hear the whole thing as the private investigator telling the woman he's been investigating (the private dancer) a long and fairly complex story about why her life has turned out the way it did, and that the dude who hired him isn't the cream of the crop himself. Your milage may of course vary, but Telegraph Road (aka US Highway 24) is a completely consistent 79.828 miles long, and incidentally perpendicularly intersects the equally famous 8-mile road, aka Michigan 102. That's right kids, i'm old enough to remember how much no fun it was before Google Maps existed. We had giant folding paper maps and no idea which roads were under construction. Now i'll excuse myself before i inadventently trail off into some humorously authentic frontier gibberish....