Time flies. Earlier this year Mark Knopfler celebrated his 40th anniversary as a recording artist. He celebrated the milestone in typical Knopfler fashion – a great wash of total silence over a giant wave of complete indifference. I doubt it was even mentioned on his website.

Instead, the former singer, guitarist and songwriter with his band Dire Straits plugged away at recording sessions for his latest work, ‘Down the Road Wherever’, a collection of 14 songs (16 on the Deluxe Edition) which demonstrate – as if it were needed – that he’s still ‘got it’ when it comes to singing, guitar playing and song writing.

This is his ninth solo album since he put a lid on Dire Straits in 1995, citing the fact that he didn’t want to be massively successful any more. It must have been torture, amassing his £75 million fortune; who can blame him for wanting to walk away from all that adulation?

Mark Knopfler has never been in step with the prevalent musical tastes of the time. In 1978 when punk was at its height, Dire Straits released ‘Sultans of Swing,’ an intricate, beautiful-sounding song almost six minutes long about a jazz band in South London.

And today, as he releases ‘Down the Road Wherever’, he once again shows that he has no interest in what the kids are into whatsoever. The album opens with ‘Trapper Man,’ and you could be forgiven for thinking, as the high string note fades in for the intro, that he had re-recorded the Dire Straits classic ‘Telegraph Road’. It sounds exactly the same.

But the song isn’t. We quickly realise though that it’s very much ‘business as usual’ as far as the songs are concerned. Everything is important – from the lyrics down to the hi-hat on the drums, everything is given equal measure. The songs are played to perfection, and the production is outstanding.

Furthermore, Knopfler has taken something of a jazz/soul route here; at least half the songs make use of brass instruments in one combination or another. It’s always interesting to try to think about the creative process that went into making these kinds of decisions. Presumably it was to make this album sound a little different from Knopfler’s previous eight. In that respect sadly, the album has failed.

Strip the brass away, and the female vocals used on a couple of songs and supplied by the ever more popular Imelda May, and you’ve got a set of Mark Knopfler songs that could have come from any time in the last 22 years. He knows what he does well and he sticks to it.

If you listen closely to some of the lyrics however, you come across a theme that transports the songs to a whole new level – he appears to be considering the inevitability of death, and the fact that, while reaching another milestone in his life, his impending 70th birthday (in August of next year), that death is coming ever closer.

The album’s title seems to suggest well, we’ll see you again sometime down the road, wherever. Another nod to his mortality perhaps? Hopefully this will not be the last Mark Knopfler album, and that there is plenty more in the tank for him, but one has to come to the inevitable conclusion that all things must pass, and one must be as ready for it as one could possibly be.

The album is quiet and reflective, even sad at times, but never morbid or depressed. There are no rockers on this record – no ‘Money For Nothing,’ ‘Heavy Fuel’ or even ‘Why Aye Man’. The trademark guitar solos do appear now and again, but they are never overlong or too fussy; they always fit so perfectly one barely notices just how good they are.

The closing song, ‘Matchstick Men’ is beautiful. The song tells of an occasion in his own history when he was forced to try and hitch a lift from Penzance in Cornwall back to his home in Newcastle, a distance of more than five hundred miles, on Christmas Eve in the snow.

As he says, from the air, this musician with great dreams and ambition, would have been nothing more than a speck in the huge expanses of snow. Alone with an acoustic guitar, Knopfler sings of a lonely musician considering his own contribution to the world, merely a ‘speck upon these vast and silent plains of snow’. This beautiful lyric suggests Knopfler is considering his own mortality, and the mark that he will leave behind. His conclusion that it will simply be a speck is either irony or false modesty.

This album is never going to win Knopfler any new fans. It will sell solidly and consistently, but not in the huge numbers of the ‘Brothers in Arms’ era. There are a number of songs which will work well when translated into live performances for another world tour that Knopfler commences in April 2019. There is plenty to please his many fans around the world, from the lyrics to the arrangements to the perfect production.

Whichever way you look at this album, it is definitely worth listening to just to wallow in Mark Knopfler’s amazing musical gift.