Songfacts®:

• "Paper Shoes" is the eleventh song on Hawksley Workman's debut album, For Him and the Girls. Workman wrote on his website about the song: "I wrote this around 7:30 am in the basement of the united church around the corner from where i was living."
  
  We asked Workman about writing the tune in our interview. "Back in those days, I was so desperately poor and all of my songwriting friends were desperately poor, so we would trade ideas on how to get access to pianos," he replied, adding, "Sometimes it would be sneaking into the U of T music campus and trying to find a piano that you could get a couple of minutes on. But because I grew up in the United Church, I knew that it was always receptive to liberal-minded kooks like me."
• This is one of Workman's most sexually charged songs. He wrote about the track's meaning on his website: "I was very much alone back in those days… and sexuality became something that i thought i could poke at and mold… i felt huge in my own environs but tiny in the wind…"
  
  Workman exploring sexuality in "Paper Shoes" is showcased well in these lyrics:
  To let your berry juice just slide out
  From in between your legs
  That intimate hideout
  
  But I, I don't mind
  I don't mind to be naked
  I still like to feel the wind
  On all my soft places