Foreign Affairs

by Tom Waits

Product Description:

Personnel: Tom Waits (vocals, piano); Bette Midler (vocals); Gene Cipriano (clarinet); Frank Vicari (tenor saxophone); Jack Sheldon (trumpet); Jim Hughart (bass); Shelly Manne (drums).

Recorded at Filmways/Heider Recording Studios, Hollywood, California in July & August 1978.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS is the most ambitious of Waits' '70s albums. In addition to the West Coast jazz style his early work drew so heavily on (here he goes to the source, with vet Shelly Manne on the drum stool), there's also a bit of lavish orchestration to solidify the classy bygone-era feel of Waits' songs. Perfect losers' love songs like "Muriel" were always his bread and butter, but the elegant'40s-ish balladry of "I Never Talk to Strangers" (a good-humored beaty-wooed-by-the-beast duet) and the epic beat poetry excursion "Potter's Field" were the furthest extensions to date of Waits' ambitions. Ironically, things are most interesting when the arrangements are scaled down, as on the contagiously sentimental barroom ballad "Sight For Sore Eyes."