Fortress Around Your Heart (Sting)

• 19 Sep 16:47
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"Fortress Around Your Heart" is a song from Sting's 1985 album The Dream of the Blue Turtles. The song was also released as a single, and reached #8 and #49 on the U.S. and U.K. singles charts, respectively. It also reached #1 for two weeks on the Billboard Top Rock Tracks chart, becoming his second consecutive #1 hit on this chart.

Sting wrote the song in the studio in Barbados in 1985. The song features a Branford Marsalis sax solo. The inspiration for this song was the pain he felt from the failure of his first marriage. In a Musician magazine interview later that year, he said:

"Fortress is about appeasement, about trying to bridge the gaps between individuals. The central image is a minefield that you've laid around this other person to try and protect them. Then you realise that you have to walk back through it. I think it's one of the best choruses I've ever written."

During one of Sting's first performances of the song in concert in Paris, his crew lowered a tiny fortress onto the stage in a parody of the similar Stonehenge scene from the film This Is Spinal Tap.

The song was included on the U.S. release of the Fields of Gold: The Best of Sting 1984-1994 compilation...

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