Brothers in Arms, Dire Straits

One of the reasons I've set myself the challenge of writing this blog is to try to learn how to avoid cliché.  However, then I come up against this track, and it's hard to know how to write anything other than some sort of stream of cliché consciousness.  

Back in the late 1980s, this was The CD to own if you had a CD player.  I think that it may have been the first reason that many people bought a player.  Oddly I think of it as contemporaneous with my getting a player, and getting into music - but it looks like my memory is off a bit; I know I got my player around New Year 1987, when I found out I had a place at university, and this came out in the middle of 1985.  Memory eh?

I lost my copy of this when the guy I lent it to at uni had his room burgled and this went with various other stuff. I'd played it very many times before this happened, which is perhaps why I didn't rush to replace it - I loved it, but I'd other stuff to buy.  Listening to it now, a quarter century later, I feel myself as that younger boy/man, searching for meaning. The convenient narrative would be that my older self sneers at that young man trying to find meaning in something now revealed as shallow or pretentious.  But I'm not sure that this story will fit.  There's something still powerful about this; it's sad, moving and oddly inspiring.  It's a clever arrangement, and the musicianship - well, even if you don't much like Mark Knopfler, you have to agree he can play the guitar.  I think the cliché is that he can make it sing.

Is cliché bad?  It's a bit like asking "Is idealism bad?"  My feeling:  No, but you shouldn't expect how you feel about it to be the same over time.