It was first played live at the opening concert of their "Making Movies" Australian tour (Perth Entertainment Centre, 22 March 1981) as the final encore. The song became a staple of Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler concerts.

The band played a slightly shorter version of the song on their 1984 album Alchemy: Dire Straits Live and a remixed version of that performance was included in their 1988 greatest hits album Money for Nothing. The original studio album version was included as the opening track on The Best of Dire Straits & Mark Knopfler: Private Investigations.

Inspired by a bus trip taken by Knopfler, the lyrics narrate a tale of changing land development over a span of many decades along Telegraph Road in suburban Detroit, Michigan. In the later verses, Knopfler focuses on one man's personal struggle with unemployment after the city built around the telegraph road has become uninhabited and barren just as it began.

In an interview on RockLine, a "rock radio network" call-in show, broadcast live on 10 May 1983, Mark Knopfler said, while on tour, he... "in fact was driving down that road and I was reading a book at the time called Growth of the Soil [by the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun], and I just put the two together. I was driving down this Telegraph Road... and it just went on and on and on forever, it's like what they call linear development. And I just started to think, I wondered how that road must have been when it started, what it must have first been. And then really that's how it all came about yeah, I just put that book together and the place where I was, I was actually sitting in the front of the tour bus at the time."

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