Foreign Affairs (Tom Waits album)

Foreign Affairs
Studio album by Tom Waits
Released	September 13, 1977 (1977-09-13)[1]
Recorded	July 28–August 15, 1977
Length	41:53
Label	Asylum
Producer	Bones Howe
Tom Waits chronology
Small Change (1976) Foreign Affairs (1977) Blue Valentine (1978)

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	link
Mojo
Pitchfork	7.8/10[2]
Robert Christgau	(B) link
The Rolling Stone Album Guide	[3]

Foreign Affairs is the fourth studio album by Tom Waits, released in 1977 on Elektra Entertainment. It was produced by Bones Howe, and featured Bette Midler singing a duet with Waits on "I Never Talk to Strangers".

Production

Bones Howe, the album's producer, remembers the album's original concept and production approach thus:

[Waits] talked to me about doing this other material [...] He said, "I'm going to do the demos first, and then I'm gonna let you listen to them. Then we should talk about what it should be." I listened to the material and said, "It's like a black-and-white movie." That's where the cover came from. The whole idea that it was going to be a black-and-white movie. It's the way it seemed to me when we were putting it together. Whether or not it came out that way, I don't have any idea, because there's such metamorphosis when you're working on [records]. They change and change.^[4]

Artwork

Pictured on the cover with Waits is a Native American woman named Marsheila Cockrell, who worked at the box office of The Troubadour in Los Angeles. "She was a girl who was... not a girlfriend but she thought she was a girlfriend."^[5]

For the album cover Waits wanted to convey the film-noir mood that coloured so many of the songs. Veteran Hollywood portraitist George Hurrell was hired to shoot Waits, both alone and in a clutch with a shadowy female whose ring-encrusted right hand clamped a passport to his chest. The back-cover shot of Tom was particularly good, casting him as a slicked-back hoodlum—half matinee idol, half hair-trigger psychopath. The inner sleeve depicted the soused singer clawing at the keys of his Tropicana upright.^[5]

Track listing

All tracks written by Tom Waits, except where noted.

Side one

Side two

Personnel

• Gene Cipriano – clarinet solos on "Potter's Field"
• Jim Hughart – bass
• Shelly Manne – drums
• Bette Midler – vocals on "I Never Talk to Strangers"
• Jack Sheldon – trumpet solos
• Frank Vicari – tenor saxophone solos
• Tom Waits – piano, vocals

Notes