| Foreign Affairs | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | September 13, 1977 | |||
| Recorded | July 28–August 15, 1977 | |||
| Studio | Wally Heider's Studio 3 (Hollywood) | |||
| Length | 41:53 | |||
| Label | Asylum | |||
| Producer | Bones Howe | |||
| Tom Waits chronology | ||||
| ||||
Foreign Affairs is the fifth studio album by singer and songwriter Tom Waits, released on September 13, 1977, on Asylum Records. [1] 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 and engineer, 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." [2]
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." [3]
"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." [3]
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    [4] |
| Christgau's Record Guide | B [5] |
| Classic Rock | 6/10 [6] |
| Mojo | [7] |
| Pitchfork | 7.8/10 [8] |
| Q | [9] |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide | [10] |
| Spin Alternative Record Guide | 5/10 [11] |
| Uncut | [12] |
Village Voice critic Robert Christgau gave a mixed review of Foreign Affairs. He appreciated the Bette Midler duet "I Never Talk to Strangers", "Jack & Neal"'s combination of poetry and jazz, the "mumbled monologue" of "Barber Shop", and the title track, which he described as "Anglophile", but lamented "Potter's Field" for its theatrical music and narrative following "a high-rolling nightstick". He critiqued the album further in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981):
"With his genre sleaze and metaphorical melodrama, Waits is a downwardly mobile escapist who believes that Everyman is a wino and Everywoman an all-night waitress who turns tricks when things get rough. The problem isn't the subjects themselves, but that for all his self-conscious unpretentiousness he inflates them. Which I guess is all we can expect of a schoolteacher's son who's been searching for his own world since he was old enough to think." [5]
All tracks written by Tom Waits, except where noted.
Side one
| No. | Title | Writer(s) | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Cinny's Waltz" (Instrumental) | 2:17 | |
| 2. | "Muriel" | 3:33 | |
| 3. | "I Never Talk to Strangers" | 3:38 | |
| 4. | "Medley: Jack & Neal/California, Here I Come" | "California, Here I Come" by Joseph Meyer, Al Jolson and Buddy De Sylva | 5:01 |
| 5. | "A Sight for Sore Eyes" | 4:40 |
Side two
| No. | Title | Writer(s) | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Potter's Field" | Words: Waits - Music: Bob Alcivar | 8:40 |
| 2. | "Burma-Shave" | 6:34 | |
| 3. | "Barber Shop" | 3:54 | |
| 4. | "Foreign Affair" | 3:46 |
Thomas Alan Waits is an American musician, composer, songwriter, and actor. His lyrics often focus on the underbelly of society and are delivered in his trademark deep, gravelly voice. He began in the folk scene during the 1970s, but his music since the 1980s has reflected the influence of such diverse genres as rock, country, Delta blues, opera, vaudeville, cabaret, funk, hip hop and experimental techniques verging on industrial music. Per The Wall Street Journal, Waits “has composed a body of work that’s at least comparable to any songwriter’s in pop today. A keen, sensitive and sympathetic chronicler of the adrift and downtrodden, Mr. Waits creates three-dimensional characters who, even in their confusion and despair, are capable of insight and startling points of view. Their stories are accompanied by music that’s unlike any other in pop history.”
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