I’m just in awe of his guitar playing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_mqt_q-7yg

Sometimes, you just gotta hit the brakes and slow down.

It’s effective. You see it in opera, and operatic/classical style music (sorry, I’m no serious student of music, so I do a lumping together of a lot of stuff that would make a serious musician blanche). And it works. Listen to Orff’s Carmina Burana as an example (yes, I know that’s not opera! Bear with me, please). You don’t get much more mad, loud, and imperative sound than is present in the climax of O Fortuna, but you also get some movements within that songe that are so quiet and understated that you have to strain to listen. You also get slower, more introspective pieces like In Trutina. Carmina Burana is very, very evocative and moving in it’s changeup.

It’s also effective in a genre you wouldn’t guess is anything less than 100% All Out: Metal. Or in my example, “Prog” (for progressive) metal. Listen to the changeups in Queensryche’s dark rock opera “Operation Mindcrime”. You get the intense shredding and higher-than-high note hits in songs like Anarchy-X and Revolution Calling followed by the slow, stately tracks like “Suite Sister Mary” or the calm-before-the-storm piece “My Empty Room”. It really works in evoking the various states of emotion within the context of the album (keep in mind, though that the context is a first person account of paranoid delusion, so it’s not expansive. But still, it’s not one note either, and that’s my point).

And getting back to Knopfler: He’s a great listen because he is a changeup from so much else of what’s out there. He’s lyrical, he’s evocative, and he’s smooth. It’s something that other, bigger, more popular performers should take note of. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes you want to see the flash and spectacle too. PBS (of all stations!) once aired part of a Beyonce concert, and honestly, it looked fun! But at the same time, you have to remember that you can electrify with simplicity. Like Leonard Nimoy once observed:

“Back in the mid-1950s, my wife and I had gone to see Belafonte sing at Los Angeles’s Greek Theatre.

For the first forty-five minutes of his performance, he scarcely moved a muscle – only stood perfectly still in front of amicrophone, his shoulders hunched, his hands resting on his thighs. And then, after all that time, he suddenly made a move. He merely lifted his right arm slowly until it hovered parallel to the floor – but the impact of that one subtle motion on the audience was tremendous. Had he been dancing around the stage, the gesture would have been meaningless; as it was, it dazzled like a lightning bolt.”

Music needs both. That’s why Knopfler is part of my listening playlist. It’s also why he’s not the *only* performer on it.

Anyway, Knopfler: His guitar playing is excellent in that it’s understated yet not minimalistic. That’s something that’s missing in a lot of popular – and dare I say it? Pop – music nowadays. Sure, I can get into someone who lets their virtuoso hang out on the High setting, but after the thousandth time, it just gets monotonous. Folks just need a changeup now and then. Which is why I can listen to DiMeola or De Lucia’s mad virtuouso one minute and turn around and put in some David Gilmour (sure, Gilmour’s not exactly a “minimalist”… but he’s no shredder either. And anyway, anyone short of a blues or jazz version of Eddie Van Halen would be minimalist compared to either DiMeola or De Lucia!). Knopfler’s guitar playing is lyrical in that respect.

And this goes on to the notion of ALL OUT MUSIC (caps intended) compared to understated play. It’s fun to switch back and forth, and for the life of me I **wish** more musicians would do the same. Carlos Santana (ignoring his distasteful worship of Che… yeah, that’s a huge fault, I admit) is someone who could do this; I listen to his live version of Europa on Moonflower, and I see him do both extremely well: He uses the understated play in the beginning to set up the mood, but climaxes in a great rush to elevate the song to a glorious height. And then comes back down gently to play it out. Wonderful, **wonderful** music. It goes beyond something I can listen to into something I can experience.

Not everybody understands that, though. In college I knew a girl, a trained singer, who told me it was a shame such a good song was wasted on a “terrible [sic] singer” like Knopfler. She played me a version by the Indigo Girls or something, and they just sledgehammered at it like robots. Just beat it to death. All the tact and feel of a steamroller. I’ve recorded more expressive drum machine tracks.

I politely told her it was a very nice recording. Some people have nerve endings six inches wide. Whitney Houston is too subtle for them, never mind Mark Knopfler.

We thought it was Dylan…the first time we heard it too!