Songfacts®:

• 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. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Aaron - Manistee, MI
• The song is not to be taken altogether seriously. In a statement before The Long Run was released, Don Henley said the album was "tongue-in-cheek cynical," and that "most of the humor is so dry nobody will think its funny."
• 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."
• Don Felder, Don Henley and Glenn Frey wrote this song. Henley sang lead and Joe Walsh played the guitar solo.
• 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.