Songfacts®:

• Jeff Healey was blind but often recorded songs that mention eyes and sight. The first Jeff Healey Band single was called "See The Light," so it wasn't too surprising for him to record "Angel Eyes," a song that starts:
  
  Girl, you're looking fine tonight
  And every guy has got you in his sight
  
  Healey lost his sight to eye cancer about a year after he was born, and when he picked up a guitar at age 3, he put it flat on his lap and played it that way, with his left hand pressing directly down on the fretboard. He kept that style his whole life, which gave him a very distinctive sound and a captivating stage presence - other guitarists watched in awe as his hands flew around the instrument.
  
  Healey was often asked about being blind, and he never ascribed it as an asset or a liability (except when he would sometimes miss the chair when he sat back down after getting up to play on stage). And you probably wouldn't have known he was blind unless someone told you, which was how he wanted it. Singing about a girl with "Angel Eyes," then, wasn't out of character. He expressed himself through his guitar and tried to sing lyrics that were relatable.
• "Angel Eyes" was written by the songwriters John Hiatt and Fred Koller and released in 1988 on See The Light, the debut album for The Jeff Healey Band. Hiatt is also an artist, who around this time released his songs "Memphis In The Meantime" and "Slow Turning." He wrote "Thing Called Love," which was a big hit for Bonnie Raitt.
  
  Healey's See The Light album starts with another song Hiatt wrote called "Confidence Man."
• "Angel Eyes" was the biggest hit for The Jeff Healey Band and their only song to get much attention in America. They formed in Toronto in 1985 and are much better known in their home country, where many of their songs got airplay .
  
  Healey built a buzz that landed him on stage with Stevie Ray Vaughan at a Toronto show on July 27, 1985, when he was 19. He quickly gathered two local musicians he had played with - Joe Rockman (bass) and Tom Stephen (drums) - and formed The Jeff Healey Band so they could take the many offers to play gigs. Earning a record deal was a challenge, so they issued the song "See The Light" as a single in 1986 independently and made a music video for it to use as a demo. Arista Records signed them and released the See The Light album in 1988. Clive Davis ran the label and made sure they had a song with hit potential to record, which is how they got "Angel Eyes." Healey wrote five of the songs on the album but the rest came from outside writers.
• Jeff Healey earned accolades from the likes of Mark Knopfler, B.B. King and Eric Clapton,
  but The Jeff Healey Band never became all that famous and Healey is rarely mentioned among the guitar GOATs. This could be because he wasn't all that self-promotional, or because he didn't land another big hit, but there are a lot of young guitarists who later discovered him on YouTube. Healey died in 2008 at 41 after being diagnosed with lung cancer.
• Watching the music video, there's no indication that Healey was blind. At concerts, if you didn't know he was blind you might go the whole show without figuring it out. He would often get up from his chair to play in short paroxysms, wowing the crowd. This is when his blindness would reveal - he'd often bump into things and sometimes have a hard time finding his chair.
• The band did overdubs for the See The Light album while they were shooting the movie Road House, where they played the house band at the Double Deuce saloon; Patrick Swayze played the bouncer. Jimmy Iovine, who was in charge of the music for the film, got them the gig - he produced one of the songs on See The Light. The movie was released in May 1989, about eight months after the album. The film gave the song a big boost - it reached its chart peak of #5 in the US in September 1989.
• The Australian singer Paulini covered "Angel Eyes" for her 2004 debut album, One Determined Heart, taking it to #1 on Australia's ARIA Chart.
• John Hiatt, the song's co-writer, plays it in concert from time to time and included a live version on his 1994 album Hiatt Comes Alive at Budokan?