Songfacts®:

• This tender guitar-picked tune finds Wesley Schultz singing about a small town beauty struggling to escape her past. The Lumineers vocalist wrote the song with Simone Felice, producer of the Cleopatra album, during motorbike trips they took to clear their heads between takes.
  
  Schultz explained to The Sun: "We'd go out on the bikes and ride around and when we hit some lights, we'd stop and sing a line back at each other. He'd say his line and I'd say mine. It was like meditating on a bike. And that is how the song Angela was written. You couldn't have scripted it but it was an amazing way to write."
• The Lumineers mapped out the whole album during a six-month stay in a rented house in Colorado and had all of the tunes written and demoed when they arrived at the studio - all except "Angela."
  
  "Going into the studio we didn't have 'Angela' written," Schultz recalled in a 2016 BMI interview. "It was written in the studio, which was unique to that song. It's the only song on the record that had an element of danger in it - an element of: This has not yet lived with us for months and months. We don't actually know how we're going to feel about it. That's somehow in that song."
• The song takes its name from Schultz's ex-girlfriend Angela Henard. "Although we didn't work out, she still holds a place in my heart," said Schultz in a 2016 interview. "This is why she is brought up in multiple songs."
  
  But not so fast - the song isn't actually about Henard. "Angela is not a person, more of an idea," the band elaborated in a 2017 Reddit AMA. "'Slow It Down' it's sort of a breakup song with NYC, and in 'Angela' it's the central character of the story - some of the songs are about real people and some are stories and metaphors."
• "Angela" is the third single from Cleopatra, following "Ophelia" and the title track.
• The album's music videos, directed by Isaac Ravishankara, tie together to tell the story of Cleopatra's life. In this installment, the title character is pregnant and uncertain about her future. Late one night, she takes a leap of faith and leaves her sleeping husband. After driving all night, she reaches a seedy motel, where she rejoices in her freedom. The clips tell the story in reverse chronological order but The Ballad Of Cleopatra compilation, released more than a year after the album, presents a linear narrative.