Walk of Life
by Dire Straits
- 86
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 47
- Danceability
- 44
- Acousticness
Mark Knopfler never meant "Walk of Life" for Brothers in Arms. He had written it as a B-side for one of the singles. Dire Straits manager Ed Bicknell heard it while it was being mixed and talked Knopfler into putting it on the album at the last minute.
Knopfler told Classic Rock in 2015 where it came from. He had seen a photograph of a kid playing a guitar in a subway, turning his face to the wall to get a good reverb. It reminded him of his own first days with a guitar, when he had no amplifier and rested the head of the guitar on the arm of a chair and put his head on it to get into a loud noise. The rhythm is a simple rock and roll one, with chords limited to I, IV and V, and the introduction has a synthesizer riff with hints of the blues. The singer, Johnny, plays "down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay", running through oldies such as "Be-Bop-A-Lula" and "Mack the Knife".
It came out in the US in October 1985 and in the UK in January 1986. It reached number seven in the US, the band's third and last top ten there, and number two in the UK. One of its two videos has Johnny playing 1950s songs in the Tyne cyclist and pedestrian tunnel.
Walk of Life runs at 86 BPM, the tempo of boom-bap hip-hop, reggae and slow R&B. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.79 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 698 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.