Songoftheday 9/30/14 - Here I am again in this mean old town...

Dire Straits - "So Far Away"
from the album Brothers In Arms (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #19 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 7

Today's Song of the Day is by the British blues-rock band Dire Straits, whose fifth album Brothers In Arms had broke big in America, scoring a #1 pop hit with "Money For Nothing" and a top-10 follow-up with "Walk Of Life". For their third single in America they went with the track they led off with in the UK and Europe, the laid-back slide guitar rock of "So Far Away", where Mark Knopfler does his best Bob Dylan impersonation, over a repetitive lyric that seems like a folk hymn...

"So Far Away" became the third top-20 pop hit from Brothers In Arms in April of 1986. The song also climbed to #29 on the Mainstream Rock radio chart, but its biggest success was at adult contemporary (or 'easy listening') radio, where it peaked all the way at #3. Internationally, "So Far Away" went top ten in Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, and top-40 in Canada, Australia, Italy, and their native Britain.

It would be their final time on the pop chart, though. The band split initially after touring behind this album, reuniting in 1991 for On Every Street, which sent three songs to the top-10 on the rock chart in America, including a #1 check-in with "Heavy Fuel". Knopfler called it a day again, concentrating on his solo work. His bandmates had reunited as "the Straits" periodically in concert.

(Click below to see the rest of the post)

...and here's the band taking the song into a calypso direction on tour in 1986...

Up tomorrow: The Glimmer Twins dance up to the Big Apple.