Street Angel is the fifth studio album by American singer and songwriter Stevie Nicks. Released in 1994, the album peaked at No. 45 on the Billboard 200 albums chart and has been certified Gold by the RIAA for shipments of over 500,000 copies.
History
The album was released in 1994 during a particularly unhappy time in Nicks' life and career. It was the first album she released after her much publicized departure from Fleetwood Mac and during the tail end of her seven-year-long dependency on the prescription medication Klonopin. It is the least successful record of her solo career, peaking at only No. 45 in the U.S. with first week sales of 38,000, and spent only three weeks within the top 100. However, the album has achieved Gold status there for shipping 500,000 copies.
Unlike all of her previous releases, the album did not yield any major hit singles, though "Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind" reached No. 57 on the Billboard Hot 100. A second single, "Blue Denim", reached No. 70 in Canada.
The album enjoyed slightly more prominence in the UK, where it peaked at No. 16. "Blue Denim" was originally lined up as the lead-release in the UK, and promotional copies were circulated to radio stations in April 1994, but it was replaced at the last moment by "Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind", which peaked at No. 42. The UK release of the "Maybe Love..." single featured two separate CD-single releases as an attempt to boost the song's chance of UK chart success (no promotional video was shot for the single, unlike "Blue Denim"), and included a newly recorded version of "Thousand Days" (originally demoed for her third solo album, Rock a Little).
Nicks was not happy with production work done by Glyn Johns on the sessions and spoke about the issues in an interview with Joe Benson: "And I didn't fix it while I was working with the person that I was working with (Johns)... who doesn't like to be talked about because he's not speaking to me, um... I didn't like it when he was there, and he knew it, and basically he told me to... like, in no uncertain English, very rough terms, to shut up and deal with it and this was the way it was going to be."
"This is not my record. So I went back in for about eight weeks and I didn't mess with the vocals, which I should have. But I was so sort of overwhelmed with trying to fix the things that I didn't like about the music, which was like... there was no percussion, there was no Waddy Wachtel. Because I was told that the last thing that I would need was Waddy Wachtel. And I, you know... I mean, to that comment I was so speechless that I just didn't do anything, I said ok. So when I went back in, I had Waddy come in and play, and I had Peter Michael come in and put percussion on, and Michael Campbell came back and put some more guitar on it, and we re-mixed everything, and we did a lot of other things besides that."
"I should have gone back in and really worked with the album, with the vocals. Because that's something that... I guess that was the last thing that I knew was wrong with it, and after being in two months trying to fix everything that I thought was wrong about the music and the mixes, it was almost kind of like, you know, maybe you just need to let this go and go on. I mean, this is three years now. And this record should have been out a long time ago. It may be new for everybody else, but it's really old for me."
Regarding the song Blue Denim, Nicks stated, "Well, I wrote this... um, it's a song about this guy who came into my life, but left just as quick. And his eyes were that intense, that it just makes you, even if you didn't know him, you would go, like, 'wow.' And you could be, like, the toughest person, but those eyes would make you be whatever he wanted you to be." Nicks later said in the video commentary of this song that the song was written about former lover Lindsey Buckingham.