Mark Knopfler has announced a new solo album. Down The Road Wherever, the former Dire Straits frontman and guitar wizard’s ninth solo album and first since 2015’s Tracker, will be out in November. “‘Down The Road Wherever’ is a line from [album track] ‘One Song At A Time,'” he explains. “I remember my pal Chet Atkins once saying that he picked his way out of poverty ‘one song at a time,’ and it just stuck in my mind. You get to an age where you’ve written quite a few songs. But Down The Road Wherever seems to be appropriate for me just because it’s what I’ve always done. I’ve always tried to make a record and also to keep my own geography happening in the songs.”

On Down The Road Wherever, that geography — “where the Delta meets the Tyne,” as Knopfler describes it — brings in stories of “Knopfler’s early days in Deptford with Dire Straits, a stray soccer fan lost in a strange town, the compulsion of a musician hitching home through the snow and a man out of time in his local greasy spoon diner,” according to a press release. Knopfler recorded the album at London’s British Grove Studios with Dire Straits keyboardist Guy Fletcher and a band that includes most of the musicians he’s worked with over the past few years, including Jim cox on keys, Nigel Hitchcock on saxophone, Tom Walsh on trumpet, John McCusker on fiddle, Mike McGoldrick on whistle and flute, Glenn Worf on bass, Ian ‘Ianto’ Thomas on drums, and Danny Cummings on percussion.

“I think the business of making a record, from having written a song and then bringing it to musicians, it can be quite a bendy route,” Knopfler says. “It’s not just motorways all the way … and you can end up in the occasional cul-de-sac, then you have to do a 16-point turn to try to get your truck back out on the main road as unobtrusively as you can. That’s part of the fun of it.” The record also features contributions from Richard Bennett, Robbie Macintosh, Trevor Mires, Imelda May, Kris Drever, Lance Ellington, Beverley Skeete, and Katie Kissoon, and today Knopfler has shared lead single “Good On You Son.” Listen to it and check out the album’s full tracklist below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Trapper Man”
02 “Back On The Dance Floor”
03 “Nobody’s Child”
04 “Just A Boy Away From Home”
05 “When You Leave”
06 “Good On You Son”
07 “My Bacon Roll”
08 “Nobody Does That”
09 “Drovers’ Road”*
10 “One Song At A Time”
11 “Floating Away”
12 “Slow Learner”
13 “Heavy Up”
14 “Rear View Mirror”*
15 “Every Heart In The Room”*
16 “Matchstick Man”

*Deluxe Edition CD bonus tracks

Down The Road Wherever is out 11/16 on British Grove Records via Blue Note. Pre-Order it here.