Foreign Affairs (Tom Waits album)
| Foreign Affairs | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Studio album by Tom Waits | ||||
| Released | September 1977 | |||
| Recorded | July 28–August 15, 1977 | |||
| Genre | rock | |||
| Length | 41:53 | |||
| Label | Asylum | |||
| Producer | Bones Howe | |||
| Tom Waits chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
  link
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| Mojo | |
| Robert Christgau | (B) link |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide |  |
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".
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.
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."
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.
All tracks written by Tom Waits, except where noted.
Side one
Side two
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Wikipedia