Mark Knopfler

Guitar World - October 2021
Interview from October 2021 Issue of Guitar World magazine

I'll try one. To me, the song "Wild Blue" sounds like it came straight off Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night — the driving-but-relaxed rhythm, the taut, clean-toned guitar lines, the soft background vocals. If I were to get even more specific, our first solo in that one sounds to my ears like Lindsey Buckingham playing through Mark Knopfler's gear.

[Laughs] The solo is certainly a Knopfler thing. Although the song makes me think more of Boz Skaggs in, like '79, '80, like a really tightly engineered, two-inch tape thing. Maybe Alan Parsons. Or [Steve Miller Band's] "Abracadabra."But the solo, that's actually the take from the first time we really played the song. And it's the only song that I brought in while we were making Sob Rock. I had nine songs and this was the 10th, and it came out in the middle of a session for something else. And that's the take. I didn't have a guitar pick so I decided to just fingerpick it. And I think it's through the Fractal, actually. It's like the "Studio Clean" setting or something like that. Don't hold me to that. But it was one of those kinds of settings. Because I was doing a scratch and it was, "Hey, let's just play the thing...''