“Fragile” by Sting

"Fragile" sits on …Nothing Like the Sun, Sting's second studio album, from 1987, and it's his elegy for Ben Linder, an American civil engineer killed by the Contras that year while he worked on a hydroelectric project in Nicaragua. Sting wrote and arranged it, sang it and played the guitars himself, something his touring guitarist Dominic Miller later said he was quite proud of. Neil Dorfsman co-produced with him and mixed it alongside Hugh Padgham.

A&M put it out as a single the following year, when it scraped to 70 in the UK, and Sting also sang it in Spanish and Portuguese, as "Fragilidad" and "Frágil", for Nada como el sol, a 1988 EP take on the album. By 1994 he was saying its meaning shifted every year, and that singing it then brought Bosnia and Yugoslavia to mind.

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