Sting – Fragile

Nylon-string guitar after a killing in Nicaragua

On 28 April 1987, Ben Linder, a 27-year-old American engineer working on a small hydroelectric project in northern Nicaragua, was killed by Contra forces. Sting wrote Fragile in response and placed it on …Nothing Like the Sun, released that October on A&M and co-produced with Neil Dorfsman. The single followed on 1 April 1988 and peaked at No. 70 in the UK, a modest chart number for a song that outlasted the news cycle.

The guitar carries the track. Sting plays nylon-string fingerstyle, harmonised lines in sixths, with a bass that enters late and leans on the second beat, closer to a shifted Latin beat than to a straight rock beat. Dominic Miller, who became the touring guitarist later, told Virtual Guitar Magazine in 1999 that Sting was proud of having played the part on the record. When Miller told fans he had played it, Sting stopped him using guitar on the song live and moved him to bass. The credit is not a rumour.

The lyric stays concrete: blood and steel, rain that washes a stain, the claim that nothing comes from violence. He also cut Fragilidad in Spanish and Frágil in Portuguese for the 1988 EP Nada como el sol. Dominic Sena directed the video, built around how easily a life breaks, with Sting on classical guitar. On the album the song sits near They Dance Alone, the other political piece from the same sessions, and near the Crisp portrait of Englishman in New York. The New York portrait jokes in a minor key and leaves the saxophone room to answer. This song stays quiet.

Producers Sting and Neil Dorfsman keep the vocal dry and close. There is no choir and no stack of guitars. The Portuguese and Spanish versions on Nada como el sol use the same guitar figure, so the same figure carries the lyric in Spanish and Portuguese as well as English. UK No. 70 was a modest peak. The guitar figure still works when the words change language.