Songfacts®:

• Eddy Grant wrote this as the title song to the 1984 movie Romancing The Stone, an action-adventure starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito. The song, though, appears only briefly in the film, with an instrumental passage playing in a scene where the "bell maker" - a man with a big gun - warms up to the main characters and invites them into his home.
  
  It's not clear why the song didn't feature more prominently in the film, but the soundtrack wasn't released until 2002, and this song isn't on it. Eddy Grant ended up including it on his 1984 album Going For Broke.
• It's clear that Grant wrote the song on an assignment, as the line "romancing the stone" doesn't make sense in the lyric, which is filled with disjointed imagery about poor hearts and peaceful waters. The song has a catchy synth-driven groove, though, and an ear-grabbing guitar solo by Grant. Released as a single, it went to #26 in the US, a chart position that certainly would have been much higher if the song was featured in the film like it was supposed to. The movie ended up doing big business at the box office and spawned a sequel called The Jewel Of The Nile in 1985. For that one, Billy Ocean's "When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going" was the theme song, and it was a huge hit, climbing to #2 in the US and #1 in the UK.
• Grant wrote and produced this song himself, as he did for all the tracks on the Going For Broke album. In America, Grant is best known for his 1982 hit "Electric Avenue" , but he also had big international hits with "I Don't Wanna Dance" and "Gimme Hope Jo'anna."
• The original version of the music video was a tie-in to the film, with Grant appearing on a replica of the set and footage from the film mixed in. When the song was largely excised from the movie, so was the film footage from the video.