YouTube and its algorithm are pretty confident that I want to see seemingly every ‘The Late Show’ guest’s answers to that show’s Colbert Questionert. While puzzling over why an audience seems to whoop and applaud someone’s take on the ‘best sandwich’ is one way to pass the minutes that make up a dull day, the one that makes me wonder is “you only get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it?” The idea that if you could only listen to one song – not all the time, mind, just that if you go to listen to music it will only be this song – is tougher for some than others.

In a way this occasionally picked up, more often forgotten series ‘Tracks’ is my way of highlighting those songs that mean enough to me to probably wind up on a short list. I suppose that I’d want it to be a good long song with lots of parts and yet manages to sustain your ear and pleasure throughout. One that hits both an emotional collection as well as being just a bloody good song. Something, perhaps, like Dire Straits’ ‘Telegraph Road’. I’m not saying that if I were to ever be asked ‘apples or oranges?’ this would be my answer but it’s certainly on the list.

I can’t remember the very first time I heard ‘Telegraph Road’ but I would’ve been young. It would have been on the cassette of Dire Straits song that my dad had in his car which, in turn, had been put together by his friend from the LPs. Telegraph Road had a tiny scratch on it. I know this to be the case rather than a blip in the tape because when that family friend was killed and the LPs became my dad’s – the scuff at “I’ve seen desperation” meant it forever jumped to “see it again.” A tiny detail but one that’s etched as clear in my memory as it is on the wax.

That means that – basing this on the passing of the aforementioned family friend – I’ve been hooked on this song for nearly four decades. It could explain where my love of a slow-burn, building song comes from. Hell you could even extrapolate further to whether that, in turn, was where my lean toward post-rock and its structures of multifaceted songs that rise and fall and span nearly quarter of an hour comes from. Either way, ‘Telegraph Road’ and I go way back.

Nearly quarter of an hour… 14 minutes and 18 seconds to be precise. Cosied up with ‘Private Investigations’ on side one of Dire Straits’ finest record Love Over Gold. This epic came to Knopfler (and is also his second song in this series) while sat in the front of a tour bus driving down the actual Telegraph Road – a 70 mile route in Michigan – and happened to be reading Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun’s novel about a man who finds a patch of soil in rural Norway, settles down and sets up his home. Mark Knopfler put the two together has he travelled down the road that “just went on and on and on forever, it’s like what they call linear development … I wondered how that road must have been when it started, what it must have first been like … 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.”

Across the song, Knopfler narrates the rise, fall, consumption by modernity – as that track becomes a six-lane monster – and collapse of Telegraph Road (a proxy for Detroit) but it’s the way in which his story is so beautifully synched to the arrangement that makes ‘Telegraph Road’ so magical for me. It starts of with a simple, single note before gradually building up in terms of both instrumentation (it’s nearly a minute before Knopfler’s resonator guitar arrives) and melody. The main theme starts close to two minutes in. There are thunder claps in there, brilliant drumming from Pick Withers (this song would be his last recording for the band) particularly with the explosive hit after ‘then there was a war.’ Knopfler’s guitar work builds apace and lets go in two terrific solos.

There is no realistic way for me to put an estimate on the number of times I’ve heard ‘Telegraph Road’. Much like Dark Side of the Moon it’s one of those musical marks in my life that seems to have been ever present. What I do know is that no matter what that number is, whenever it comes on shuffle in the car I still listen transfixed throughout and that my copy of Love Over Gold (which doesn’t jump the ‘..explode into flames, and I..’ part) has had many a spin. I can also say that their recent remastering campaign means listening to it again on a good pair of headphones is pretty amazing. Whether that means that this song is the one I’d choose to be the only song I can listen to again… well, that’s still undecided but it’s definitely a contender.

Love Over Gold, Dire Strait’s fourth (and best) album was their last to feature original drummer Pick Withers who felt the band was becoming too loud and wanted to get off the treadmill. Rhythm guitarist David Knopfler had already left under less pleasant circumstances. As such Love Over Gold serves as a transitional record for the band as the last of the original members were augmented by new players including Alan Clark on keyboards as Knopfler’s compositions grew in scope and the band evolved into that which would go on to record Brothers In Arms, trot around stadiums around the world, taking a break, coming back to do it all again one more time with On Every Street before Knopfler decided that maybe Pick Withers was right – it was all getting a bit loud and time to get off. Dire Straits have sold an estimated 120 million records, been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (whatever that really means) but are exceedingly unlikely to reunite.