This is a war-themed song, obviously.  They seem to be all the rage now.  Hell, I guess they've always been the rage.

Of course, as good an arrangement as this song has, I'd like it just as much if it were about indoor plumbing.  Ride across that river, indeed.

Click here to watch a fan-made video for "Ride Across the River" on YouTube.

Click here for a live performance.

This is part of a week-long series on the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms.

This may be the most lullaby-like rock song ever recorded.  It just has this really nice tranquilizing quality - it can put you right out, but the right way, without simply boring you to sleep.

It has such a great guitar line as well.  I've messed with it before, I'm sure I have a magazine buried somewhere with a tablature (for the non-musical: a tablature is a piece of guitar sheet music with fret numbers as well as notes) in it.  I should go dig it out.  Then maybe I can put people to sleep the right way, without being so boring.

Click here to watch a fan-made video for "Why Worry" on YouTube.

Click here for a live performance.

This is part of a week-long series on the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms.

OK, now that we've gotten the "hits" out of the way, let's turn our attention to one of the album's exceptional filler tracks, the smooth, jazzy "Your Latest Trick."  Notice how I didn't use the term "smooth jazz" - the fact that this song does not make me want to vomit violently disqualifies the use of that term.

You wouldn't think that this song would be mentioned in the same breath as "Stairway to Heaven", but here is a snippet from its Wikipedia blurb:

The saxophone introduction to the song, as Mark Knopfler says on the Sultans of Swing: The Very Best of Dire Straits DVD, is now widely used when people are trying out saxophones at music shops, just as Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven is widely used when trying out guitars. Having one of his songs used in such a way is something that he always dreamt of.

Believe it or not, I looked up the word "dreamt."  It's in there.

Click here to hear "Your Latest Trick" on YouTube.

Click here for a live performance.

This is part of a week-long series on the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms.

Like "Money for Nothing", "Walk of Life" was also a huge hit.  It was everywhere.  But I never soured on it quite so much as I did on "Nothing."  It was just one of those "feel-good" songs that made everyone upbeat and happy.

Of course, I don't believe that a song has to be bright and cheerful to be a "feel-good" song.  To me, "Walk of Life" feels good because it IS good.

Click here to watch the video for "Walk of Life" on YouTube.

Click here for a live performance.

This is part of a week-long series on the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms.

OK, just to get this out of the way, I will not be posting "Money for Nothing."  Why?  Simple - I don't need to.  Besides, that's my least favorite track from Brothers in Arms, and it probably would be even if it wasn't the smash hit that it was.

I will, however, post the album's opening cut, "So Far Away."  This may not be your typical attention-grabbing opener, but I think its unassuming nature seems apropos for what was essentially an unassuming band.  This group was never much of an attention whore, and having this track begin the record would seem to reflect that.

Click here to watch the video for "So Far Away" on YouTube.

Click here for a live performance.

This is part of a week-long series on the Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms.

When I posted a Dire Straits song a few weeks ago, I seriously considered giving them a whole week, but decided I wasn't familiar enough with the band's catalog to do that.  But I still felt that the amazing Mark Knopfler and the rest of the group deserved more than just one throwaway post.  So, for the first time on the MSaD, I am dedicating a whole week to a single album - the incredible Dire Straits classic Brothers in Arms (1985).

This is probably the first album I think of when people bash 80s music.  In fact, I generally don't buy into any argument in favor of any decade's musical history over another's.  Whether it's the 60s, 70s, 80s or whatever, there's good and bad in all of them, and I don't think it's really fair to judge one decade solely by its jewels and another solely by its turds.  So, here is one of the shiniest jewels of the 1980s.

Wikipedia article on Brothers in Arms

George Clinton wrote this song.  Obviously it's going to be drenched in LATFAP.

Click here to watch the video for "Hot Sauce" on YouTube.

HAAAAAAA-LE-LU-JAH!!  Today is German baroque composer George Frideric Handel's birthday.  He would be, let's see...

...323 years old today.  If only he could know how the "Hallelujah" chorus from his oratorio Messiah has been ingrained into our culture.  That word and even that very melody have become synonymous with any kind of immediately relevant discovery or breakthrough.

Actually, he'd probably just be called a "one-hit wonder."  Maybe it's better he's not around.

Click here to watch a live performance of "Hallelujah" on YouTube.  HAAAAAAA-LE-LU-JAH!!

I've talked pretty frequently about how some music doesn't get the attention it should.  Something else I'd like to mention in that vein is the 1986 B-52's album Bouncing Off the Satellites.  Shortly after it was recorded, guitarist Ricky Wilson died from an AIDS-related illness.  Devastated, the band pretty much vanished from the face of the earth for a few years, and with no tour or other promotional activity to support it, this record effectively disappeared with them.

That just made Wilson's passing that much more tragic, because I like this album a lot - much more than the more commercially successful Cosmic Thing.  I could choose one of many tracks from it, but hey, there's a YouTube fanvid for "Detour Thru Your Mind", so here it is.