When I started playing guitar, I swore I would never stop until I nailed the solo on this song and from this particular live album. Well, I'm still a long way from perfecting it, but I'm getting closer. What a song ♥
" 'Fortress Around Your Heart' was written in the studio in '85, in Barbados. I'd just been playing around with those chords on the guitar - strange, modal chords. They sounded kind of medieval actually and so I got into a whole line of thinking about medieval sieges, castle walls, siege guns, armies sleeping under tattered flags and thought it was a nice metaphor for love gone wrong. Armies fighting each other, relationships having collapsed and gone from bad to worse, and what starts as love ends in war. It's 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.