“Fortress Around Your Heart” by Sting, arranged with tab for fingerstyle guitar by Daryl Shawn.
“Fortress Around Your Heart” was inspired by Sting’s divorce. The pain he felt at the collapse of his first marriage led him to write some of his biggest hits, including “Every Breath You Take” and “King of Pain”.[citation needed] Sting wrote the song in the studio in Barbados in 1985. The song features a Branford Marsalis sax solo. In a Musician magazine interview later that year, Sting 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 realize 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.
Lyrics:
Under the ruins of a walled city
Crumbling towers and beams of yellow lights
No flags of truce, no cries of pity
The siege guns have been pounding through the nights
It took a day to build the city
We walked through its streets in the afternoon
As I returned across the field’s I’d known
I recognized the walls that I’d once laid
Had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I’d laid
And if I built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire
Then I went off to fight some battle
That I’d invented inside my head
Away so long for years and years
You probably thought or even wished that I was dead
While the armies are all sleeping
Beneath the tattered flag we’d made
I had to stop my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I’d laid
And if I built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire
This prison has now become your home
A sentence you seem prepared to pay
It took a day to build the city
We walked through its streets in the afternoon
As I returned across the lands I’d known
I recognized the fields where I’d once played
Had to stop in my tracks for fear
Of walking on the mines I’d laid
And if I built this fortress around your heart
Encircled you in trenches and barbed wire
Then let me build a bridge
For I cannot fill the chasm
And let me set the battlements on fire
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