Street Angel

this song was written right before she went into recovery...

it was a bungled attempt that if heard would have changed it all... but doctors were determined to keep pills on both sides..seems timely really..i would run off that train to you

Maybe this track comes from Street Angel era but it's a really good song, especially lyrically. Stevie Nicks said it's about homelessness and also that sometimes some homeless people got used to live on the street and they don't want to change it. That gypsy girl (or just a homeless chick) lives on the street. Then appears a man who claims that he loves her and he could give her home, safe place, money, clothes etc. But she refuses. She prefers living just the way she does because in spite of all the difficulties and dangers that homelessness gives she she feels good and free. And she doesn't want to exchange this freedom for material goods. Well, as I remember Nicks wrote it when she needed to leave her house because of some struggles and before she got to the hotel she'd seen all those homelessness people living on some street. It was a fear for her what would it be like if she was one of them. But here I can post all her comments about this lyrics: ....................................................................................................................... “‘Street Angel’ was written at a hotel in Los Angeles, the Peninsula Hotel. I had to leave my house that I lived in because my house was attacked by bees, and it was a five-story house that, kind of like a New York house, went straight up. And I lived there, and Liza [Jane Edwards] lived there, and three or five other people lived there, and we all had to go because the bees were so intense that they had to come in and move the bees, not kill ’em, just move them. And I went to the Peninsula and that particular week there was two movies on TV about homeless people, and there was also a lot of stuff on CNN about it. And I was really very, very touched at how sad the situation was and I didn’t have any solutions. ....................................................................................................................... “This is not a political song, but what I did was, I was just kind of looking out at Hollywood and the sparkly lights and the people that are walking up and down the street, and I thought how wild it would be if I was out there and I didn’t have a place to go, if I didn’t have a place to sleep. This would be to me the most frightening thing of all, kind of like, just as long as you have enough money to pay your rent, you can accept just about anything. But as soon as somebody starts threatening with taking away your house, that’s really frightening to me. ....................................................................................................................... “So I just wrote a song about a girl that had been brought up on the streets and was very much kind of a street gypsy, you know. She didn’t have any special place to live. But her family was there, and her friends, and she was a street angel. And this guy, this rich guy fell in love with her and really tried to convince her to go with him and to not be poor anymore and to marry him and to leave her world. And in the end, she really couldn’t do that, she really couldn’t leave her life. She really couldn’t change and be a rich man’s lady. And so she, in order to make him let her go and in his mind let her go and go on with his life, she let it be known to him that she had killed herself, that she committed suicide, that she’d fallen down the steps and then killed. And you don’t hear voices anymore. He doesn’t hear her voice anymore, and she went away, you know, ’cause she really couldn’t live his kind of life. So it is about somebody with no home, but it’s also about somebody being very attached to a way of life.” (WMMR Philadelphia, 1994)