![\"Don](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Don-Henley-2019-The-Eagles-Musician-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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Credits: Sports and Music Photographer via Flickr<\/p>\n
Sat 18 April 2026 20:30, UK <\/p>\n
For Don Henley<\/a>, any great song is going to feel like your child after a while. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019t bound to last long once they started performing them after a while.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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\u2019t mean that Henley and Glenn Frey weren\u2019t going to give it a fair shot, though.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And while Henley did have a fair bit of genius left in the tank on the title track, \u2018Those Shoes\u2019 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 \u2018Victim of Love\u2019<\/a>, \u2018Those Shoes\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, \u201cIt was a tough one. I remember they were playing me \u2018Those Shoes.\u2019 At the end, I said, \u2018Goddamn, that\u2019s great.\u2019 And Glenn said, \u2018I think so too!\u2019 And Henley said, \u2018Well, I liked it at first\u2026\u2019 [Laughs] It was kind of like that.\u201d<\/p>\n Then again, that\u2019s normally the test that separates the good songs from the great ones. Any song that\u2019s 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\u2019s a good chance that it wasn\u2019t going to get top priority in the setlist when they eventually got back together a decade after the fact.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not like Henley was alone in thinking some of the songs weren\u2019t up to snuff. During the recording of the record, Frey said over and over again that he wasn\u2019t a fan of the song \u2018The Disco Strangler\u2019, and considering most of the record took a long time to make, it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n So while The Long Run is still a decent album from the Eagles, \u2018Those Shoes\u2019 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\u2019t get everything to sound perfect, they were going to have to settle for some songs that they didn\u2019t feel had the right stuff.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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