Songfacts®:

• This is the only song on Judas Priest's Screaming For Vengeance album that wasn't written by their creative team of frontman Rob Halford and guitarists Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing. It was written by Bob Halligan, Jr., a songwriter with United Artists publishing in America. A song plugger (person tasked with pitching songs to artists) there was May Pang, who was John Lennon's mistress for a time. She asked Bob to write a song in the vein of Foreigner, and he came up with "(Take These) Chains" in just a few hours. Pang placed the song not with Foreigner but with Judas Priest, which were looking for a more mellow hit.
  
  It was Halligan's first significant song placement, and it set him on a path as one of the top writers in the world of hard rock, a genre he never intended to enter. Halligan wrote another song called "Some Heads Are Gonna Roll" specifically for Judas Priest, which they included on their next album, Defenders Of The Faith, in 1984. Again, he was the only outside writer to place a song on the album.
  
  By this time, Priest had a huge following, so other bands sought out Halligan. He ended up writing for Blue Öyster Cult ("Beat 'Em Up"), Kix ("Midnite Dynamite," "Don't Close Your Eyes") and Kiss ("Rise To It") before taking a turn to lite rock with songs for Michael Bolton and Cher. In 1995, he started a Celtic rock group called Ceili Rain.
• The guy in this song is tormented by heartbreak, with the feeling that her chains are still around his heart. It's a theme that Hank Williams, Erasure and many others have explored.
  
  In a Songfacts interview with the song's writer, Bob Halligan, Jr., he talked about the meaning. "All the stuff is fact in there somewhere, but it's fiction based in fact," he said. "If there's any real life I can't remember what it is. But you find inspiration in whatever delights you or upsets you in a given moment, and you just expand on it and go with it and write whatever song is available to you that day."
• "(Take These) Chains" was the second single from Screaming For Vengeance, following "You've Got Another Thing Comin'." For the single release, the title was shortened to "Chains."
  
  They didn't make a video for the song, which held it back, especially in America where MTV was spinning "You've Got Another Thing Comin'." The album, though, became Priest's most successful, selling over 2 million copies just in America.