Songfacts®:

• In this melancholy song, Stewart plays a lovelorn sort whose girl has moved to the big city, where she fits right in. When she left, he was soon forgotten; "No I never got the letters that you said you'd send me," he sings.
  
  "'Sand In Your Shoes' was my attempt at doing a folk-rock song," he explained in a promotional interview CD. "I'd grown up listening to Bob Dylan and everything of that ilk, and I wanted to write something in that style."
• The big hit from the Year Of The Cat album was the title track, except in South Africa, where "Sand In Your Shoes" was released as the first single and went to #6. Stewart explained:
  
  "I was convinced this would be the single. I went to the record company and said, 'Please release 'Sand In Your Shoes' as the single.' And they did... in South Africa. It was a hit in South Africa but it was not a hit anywhere else in the world. This was the beginning and the end of my ability to pick singles. I still think in some parallel universe this is a hit."