Fragile

Sting wrote it and plays the guitar himself; touring guitarist Dominic Miller said he was quite proud of that, and Miller played bass live. Songfacts says it was written in 1987 during a tropical storm on Montserrat. It is a tribute to Ben Linder, born July 7, 1959 in San Francisco, an American engineer building a hydroelectric plant in El Cua, Nicaragua, who died there on April 28, 1987. Songfacts calls him a Peace Corps volunteer, which Wikipedia does not support. Sting told the Miami Herald in 1994 that the meaning changes yearly, and when he sings it now he thinks of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, and told NPR's Michel Martin that it has a lot of uses that we never foresaw.

The single, released on April 1, 1988, reached 70 in the UK, 11 in Flanders and 10 on the Dutch Top 40. Spanish and Portuguese versions, "Fragilidad" and "Fragil", are on Nada como el sol, and the Portuguese one is track 10 on the Brazilian edition of the album. The live version opened the September 11, 2001 concert at Villa Il Palagio in Tuscany, released on All This Time; Sting initially planned to play only this song and let the audience decide whether to continue, and the live version was reportedly nominated for a Grammy, which we have not confirmed. He played it with cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, opened his Bataclan concert in Paris on November 12, 2016 with it, and played it at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in March 2026.

Isaac Hayes covered it on Branded (1995), Kenny Barron on The Moment, and Sting recorded it with Julio Iglesias on Duets (2021) and with Barbra Streisand on The Secret of Life (2025). A student choir sang it in Netflix's Adolescence (2025), which Sting called beautiful. The upload is presumably the album version.