Songfacts®:

• Nelson wrote and performed this song for his starring role as a country singer in the 1981 movie Honeysuckle Rose. It's a very moving song about loss, with Nelson using the metaphor of a fallen angel to describe someone who leaves him after he helps them through a difficult time.
• The origins of this song are a little murky. Some fans assume the title angel refers to the Hells Angels biker Charlie Magoo, a friend of Nelson's who was killed, though the singer won't confirm or deny it. He has hinted that it's about his former wife Connie Koepke - they were having marital problems around the time he wrote it. But its meaning is open to interpretation.
  
  "It's a pretty general theme that can be taken and applied to a lot of different situations," Nelson told the magazine Country Rhythms. "A lot of people have taken it and applied it to their own situation. You could relate it to someone who has died, love affairs or whatever... It has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people who have no idea why I wrote that song."
• During live performances, Nelson sometimes dedicates this song to his son Billy, the third child from his first marriage to Martha Matthews, who committed suicide in 1991.
• "Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground" is one of Willie Nelson's most popular songs. It was his seventh #1 Country hit as a solo artist, and a song that stayed in his setlists throughout his career.
• Bob Dylan covered this song while recording his 1983 album Infidels.
• Nelson recorded a live version of this song with Patty Griffin for his 2005 album Songs for Tsunami Relief: Austin to South Asia to aid the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.
• During a show at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Nelson was shocked when the crowd, and his own band, starting laughing during his heartfelt performance. That is, until he spotted his bass player, Bee Spears, flying over the audience in ballet tights and a tutu. Spears took advantage of the wires left behind from a production of Peter Pan to stage the gag.
• Nelson composed this in 1976 but held it back for just the right moment (when it was released as the second single from the Honeysuckle Rose soundtrack). "Sometimes I'll keep a song for a while before I release it," he explained in The Billboard Book Of Number One Country Hits. "I like to wait until I think it has a chance, because if it's an exceptionally good song and it gets lost in the shuffle, you always wish that you would have waited for a better time to put it out. If you put it out at the wrong time, you've lost a good song."
• In a 1991 Vanity Fair interview, Nelson revealed that there's an extra verse to "Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground" that he edited out of the song:
  
  The time we spent together
  The blinking of an eye
  But time stands still
  When love wants to be found
  The world we built together
  Still spinning in the air
  For angels flying too close to the ground