The Eagles song Don Henley fell out of love with: “A tough one”
For Don Henley, any great song is going to feel like your child after a while.
Even though some of the biggest names in music like the idea of working diligently until they have a song that sounds right, the best ones almost seem to fall out of the sky and are practically beamed into the singer’s head when they are first chipping away in the studio. But whereas some songs sounded a lot better on paper, Henley felt that there were a handful of their tunes that weren’t bound to last long once they started performing them after a while.
Because while the band themselves have released some fantastic material throughout their career, Henley was always the most critical of their work. He felt that they had a high bar to clear every single time they walked into the studio, and while Hotel California was the best that they could have hoped to make, but when it slowly turned into one of the best-selling records of all time, there was no chance that anyone could have hoped to follow that up so quickly. That didn’t mean that Henley and Glenn Frey weren’t going to give it a fair shot, though.
They had shown up to the studio to record The Long Run with not a single song completed, and while the record did have a proper sheen to it, you could feel that the band were taking their time because they were too fried. They had been on the road for years on end at this point, and even though they had earned the right to take some time off if they wanted to, the beast still needed to be fed.
And while Henley did have a fair bit of genius left in the tank on the title track, ‘Those Shoes’ was one of the few times where things started to stall. Henley liked the idea of keeping that moody energy that the band had been working on during Hotel California, but whereas that album had a track like ‘Victim of Love’, ‘Those Shoes’ was a decent song that sounded like it had a double-talk box solo tacked onto the end of it to make it sound finished.
It was hard for any of them to be too critical of their work in the press, but when Bob Seger dropped by the studio to see what they were working on, he remembered Henley being a little bit perturbed about having to play it relentlessly to hear what they had done, saying, “It was a tough one. I remember they were playing me ‘Those Shoes.’ At the end, I said, ‘Goddamn, that’s great.’ And Glenn said, ‘I think so too!’ And Henley said, ‘Well, I liked it at first…’ [Laughs] It was kind of like that.”
Then again, that’s normally the test that separates the good songs from the great ones. Any song that’s able to hold up over years of overplay, but if the band was already starting to get tired of themselves after the first round of play-throughs, there’s a good chance that it wasn’t going to get top priority in the setlist when they eventually got back together a decade after the fact.
But it’s not like Henley was alone in thinking some of the songs weren’t up to snuff. During the recording of the record, Frey said over and over again that he wasn’t a fan of the song ‘The Disco Strangler’, and considering most of the record took a long time to make, it wasn’t like any of them wanted to hear any of the tunes the minute that they walked out of the studio, which explains why all of that tension eventually boiled over when they broke up after a charity gig in Long Beach.
So while The Long Run is still a decent album from the Eagles, ‘Those Shoes’ is just one example of the problems that they were having behind the scenes. It could have made for a decent 2/3rds of an album, but since they couldn’t get everything to sound perfect, they were going to have to settle for some songs that they didn’t feel had the right stuff.
