Fortress Around Your Heart

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“Fortress Around Your Heart”
Single by Sting from the album The Dream of the Blue Turtles
B-side	"Consider Me Gone" (live)
Released	October 1, 1985
Format	7", 12"
Genre	Rock
Length	4:48
Label	A&M Records
Producer	Sting and Peter Smith
Sting singles chronology
"Love Is the Seventh Wave" (1985) "Fortess Around Your Heart" (1985) "Russians" (1985)

"Fortress Around Your Heart" is a Sting song from his 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.

Sting wrote the song in the studio in Barbados in 1985. A Branford Marsalis sax solo is the highlight of the song.^[1] 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.

A live version of the song, recorded in the Netherlands, was included on the U.S. release of the Fields of Gold compilation album.

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