The late Eagles song Don Henley called a personal “favourite”
Most of the Eagles tend to be about the greater problems in life. Don Henley was never going to be satisfied writing breezy rock and roll until the end of time, and their songs about serious topics like ‘Hotel California’ and ‘The Last Resort’ are half the reason why people both love and hate the band’s music to this day. Henley may have had a knack for making a perfect melodic song, but one of his all-time favourite Eagles tunes was when they got the lead out on ‘Those Shoes’.
At the same time, to say the Eagles could rock when they wanted is like talking about Paul McCartney’s “granny music” in The Beatles…it’s nice, but it’s not usually what people come there for. Although Hotel California was more of a singer-songwriter album when the band conceived it, the mission statement going into The Long Run seemed to be…absolutely nothing.
For a band that was known to work out their parts in advance and try to come up with the perfect take to tie everything together, no one came into the studio with any songs, which probably wasn’t helped by the fact that everyone was high out of their minds on cocaine. Whereas some songs would have taken a few days to complete, they spent months on end with nothing getting done.
It sounds like it if you listen to songs like ‘Those Shoes’. While the tune comes dangerously close to being completely overproduced, it’s actually one of the highlights of the record’s back half, featuring Don Felder and Joe Walsh having a talkbox guitar duel towards the end of the tune and hammering away at one of the better riffs they ever came up with.
Compared to the different love songs they had written over the years, hearing them sing about the life of an independent woman is also fairly progressive by rock band standards. There had been many meatheaded songs about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but Henley at least tried to make things a two-way conversation.
Maybe that’s why Henley considered it one of the best songs of their later years, telling Cameron Crowe, “[It’s] one of my favourites. On the surface, the song was about the singles scene: the beautiful, young women seemingly unaware of the sharks waiting in the shallows… sharks that sometimes included us. It was also a great, great beat. It gave Felder a chance to strap on the talkbox, a device which Joe Walsh pioneered on ‘Rocky Mountain Way’”.
Considering how well this song turned out, it’s baffling how the rest of the album felt half-baked. The singles like ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ and the title track may have been fun, but the rapid-fire tone of ‘The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks’ and the shoddy lyrics of ‘The Disco Strangler’ do sound like a band at their wit’s end trying to turn anything they can into music.
‘Those Shoes’ could justifiably be considered the dark side of a song like ‘Lyin’ Eyes’, but really, it was just a good song pasted on one of the worst eras of the group. Things may have seemed happy, but if they kept going like this, it was only a matter of time before they killed each other.
