Tunnel of Love

For a while, the lights and the music make a brief encounter feel like the beginning of everything.

Tunnel of Love understands how completely a single evening can take you over. It also understands the strange afterlife of those evenings: years later, you may remember the atmosphere more clearly than what anyone actually said.

The full opening track on Making Movies gives that memory time to unfold. There is movement everywhere: the fairground introduction, the push of the band, Knopfler’s conversational voice finding its way through the noise. The song feels inhabited before the story has gone very far.

He is good at making an encounter feel casual while letting you hear how much it will matter afterward. The attraction is there in the detail and in the way the vocal lingers. The music keeps carrying the night forward. You want it to last because the people inside it want that too.

Then the guitar takes over.

That closing stretch is the part I keep coming back for. The phrases have room to rise, hesitate and reach again. There is an ache in them that the earlier momentum could only hint at. The story has given the solo something to remember.

Eight minutes lets the song change its meaning around you. What begins with the promise of an evening ends with the feeling of looking back at one. The lights are still bright in your head. You just cannot get back there.