“Where the Rose is Sown” by Big Country

"Where the Rose Is Sown" was the second single Big Country pulled from Steeltown, their second album, in 1984, slotting in between "East of Eden" and "Just a Shadow". Stuart Adamson wrote the words, the music is credited to the band, Adamson with Bruce Watson, Tony Butler and Mark Brzezicki, and Steve Lillywhite produced it with Will Gosling engineering. It reached 29 in Britain and 25 in Ireland, and MTV gave the video medium rotation.

Reviewers split down the middle. Cash Box heard a pounding slab of tragic political rock, sharpened by Adamson's biting delivery; Billboard thought the band's stirring power got lost in muddy sound. Smash Hits sniffed at more of the same, while Number One caught the ghost of an old '60s hit lurking behind the guitar solos, the "heeyahs" and Lillywhite's wall of sound, and liked it anyway.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.