On Every Street

For someone who writes about music, my iPod working-out playlist is embarrassingly limited - maybe 15 or 20 different albums, most of which are more than two decades old. What can I say? I have a fair selection of sedate electronica, airy jazz and other cerebria onboard, but ECM jazz isn't always the best stuff to pound a treadmill to.

One of my favorites is a Mark Knopfler/Dire Straits collection, ripped from a double CD I gave Sharon for her birthday a few years back. I typically don't go for compilations, especially for artists I count as favorites (too many non-radio cuts left out), but this one is okay.

Karin liked Dire Straits. I played "Walk of Life" at her funeral, and that song is now (sadly) more or less done for me. But another selection, the title track to the Straits' last studio album On Every Street, also bears a nasty barb for me. The lyrics, especially the first verse, really get me.

There's gotta be a record of you some place
You gotta be on somebody's books
The lowdown - a picture of your face
Your injured looks

The sacred and profane
The pleasure and the pain
Somewhere your fingerprints remain concrete
And it's your face I'm looking for on every street

And the hook, simple and evocative, that rides the song out after the vocal section, recalls a pixel-detailed memory of the two of us rolling down a Colorado mountain valley highway, arms-length from each other in the cavernous and rattly Scout, on the way together to a sunny and isolated place in the lost wilds of the high country. Just the three of us, pretending we would live forever, squinting off the Colorado sun.

And now, of the three of us, it's just me. And this song.

That's how this stuff works....