About The Song
Don Felder, Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote this song. Henley sang lead and Joe Walsh played the guitar solo.
This song is about men who take advantage of lonely single women. While the men in the song take on a predator role, the woman appears to compromise her principles by putting herself in a bad situation. Her shoes, which apparently are high-heeled (and very uncomfortable) with “pretty little straps around your ankles,” are a metaphor for this compromise.
Former Eagles member Don Felder recalled how he’d been inspired by a love for jazz and his appreciation of bandmate Joe Walsh when he wrote “Those Shoes” for 1979 album The Long Run.
He sat down with a very clear intention for the track, as he told Uncle Joe Benson on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show.
“I was always a big jazz fan; I love Miles Davis,” Felder said. “He could play just a few notes and get so much soul in. When Joe joined the band, Joe had been using this talkbox, which he used on [solo track] ‘Rocky Mountain Way.’ I wanted to write a song that Joe and I could both play talkboxes on, that sounded like two trumpets playing the melody.”
He remembered creating all the parts, including the talkbox sections, then he “put it on a reel with a bunch of other song ideas for The Long Run and turned it in.” The response from his colleagues was positive: “Glenn [Frey] and Don [Henley] said, ‘That’s great – we gotta do that on this record.’ We actually played that track live in the studio with dueling talkboxes… and no overdubs. I think the lead vocal’s overdubs is about the only thing.”
Don Felder and Joe Walsh did a double talk-box guitar solo at the end, which is very unusual. Joe Walsh was an early practitioner of the device, which he used on his solo hit “Rocky Mountain Way.” In a 1981 interview with the BBC, Walsh talked about the device: “There’s a Country singer from Nashville named Dottie West who’s a longtime friend of mine, and her husband is a pedal steel guitar player named Bill West, who actually came up with the concept of the talkbox, but never really got the credit for it. There was a record which I think was called ‘Forever’ by Pete Drake in the late ’50s, and they used it on that and various people used it. I met Bill and Dottie in Nashville, and Bill showed me this talkbox and gave me a prototype that he had, which I used for ‘Rocky Mountain Way’, and Don Felder and I pursued that in the Eagles and worked out some double guitar parts, and it turned into a song, which was ‘Those Shoes,’ and that’s actually both of us playing through talkboxes, which hadn’t really been done. It’s an old idea, but that was a new innovation.”
The Eagles were not on the best of terms when recording The Long Run, which was their last album before they re-formed in 1994. They frustrated their record company as it took them 3 years to follow up their very successful Hotel California album, which was released in 1976. Ironically, sessions for The Long Run took place at Love ‘n’ Comfort Studios in Los Angeles.
Video
Lyric
Tell us what you’re gonna do tonight mama
There must be someplace you can go
In the middle of the tall drinks and the drama
There must be someone you know
God knows you’re lookin’ good enough
But you’re so smooth and the world’s so rough
You might have somethin’ to lose
Oh, no pretty mama
What you gonna do in those shoes?
Got those pretty little straps around your ankles
Got those shiny little chains around your heart
You got to have your independence
But you don’t know just where to start
Desperation in the singles bars
All those jerkoffs in their fancy cars
You can’t believe your reviews
Oh, no you can’t do that
Once you started wearin’ those shoes
(butt out)
(butt out)
(butt out)
(butt out)
(butt out butt out) They’re lookin’ at you leanin’ on you
(butt out butt out) Tell you anything you want to hear
(butt out butt out) They give you tablets of love
(butt out butt out)
(butt out butt out) They’re waiting for you got to score you
(butt out butt out) Handy with a shovel and so sincere
(butt out butt out) Ooh… they got the kid glove
(butt out butt out)
You just want someone to talk to
They just wanna to get their hands on you
You get whatever you choose
Oh, no you can’t do that
Once you started wearin’ those shoes
Oh, no you can’t do that
Once you started wearin’ those shoes
(butt out butt out)
Umm
(butt out butt out)
Shoot
(butt out butt out)
(butt out butt out)
Whoa-whoa
(butt out butt out)
(butt out butt out)
(butt out butt out)
(butt out)