"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 album.
Famous quotes containing the words fortress and/or heart:
“There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)
“The Japanese do not fear God. They only fear bombs.”
—Jerome Cady, U.S. screenwriter. Lewis Milestone. Yin Chu Ling, The Purple Heart (1944)