Foreign Affairs

Foreign Affairs is the fifth studio album by singer and songwriter Tom Waits, released on September 13, 1977 on Asylum Records. 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 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." 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."