Mark Knopfler Explains How He Unintentionally Became a Songwriter, Opens Up on His Relationship With Electric Guitar..

Mark Knopfler recalled how working as a journalist led him to songwriting, arguing that he considers himself a songwriter first and musician second.

It’s not unusual for people to unexpectedly get into hobbies, as the great bread-baking boom of the pandemic illustrates. Similarly, Mark Knopfler accidentally became one of the greatest songwriters of his generation — you know, as one does. In a new interview on the Rockonteurs podcast with Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt, Knopfler said that he never intentionally set out to become a songwriter, but that it started out as a pastime during his post-college journalist days.

According to the Dire Straits legend, his first forays into songwriting happened as he’d idly look at pieces of news stories that he’d done, noting some of them would end up as parts of songs (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):

“I didn’t see myself as a songwriter at all. I was just a strummer. I remember some of the stories that I was doing for the paper, I’d see bits of them in my notebook afterwards, and they’d start creeping into the songs. So if I were sent to interview the city varieties in Leeds, go and talk to the cast of the pantomime. I’d be talking to the ugly sisters, you know, a couple of old dudes… And that became ‘One More Matinee.’ I started taking their lines and making them into lines of a song.”

“I think that’s when I transferred… I might have had bits of songs, but… I was busy copying songs. I didn’t see myself as a songwriter at all. And so, I sort of eased into it that way, and ended up being the guy who writes the songs. Now, I think I’m a songwriter [first] and a musician second. [Being a musician is] very different from being a songwriter, to me.”