Fifty years after Tom Waits released Small Change, the album is getting the anniversary treatment it deserves. Anti- Records has announced a new vinyl reissue of the 1976 classic, due October 2.
A high-water mark of Waits’ legendary ’70s run, Small Change is where his singular sound—and now-iconic gravelly voice—fully came into focus. The record mixes jazz, blues, beat poetry, cabaret, the Great American Songbook and Waits’ own wonderfully warped storytelling into songs that feel equal parts barroom confession and late-night fever dream.
It’s also home to enduring Waits classics including “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” “Step Right Up” and “The Piano Has Been Drinking.”
When the album arrived, Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn hailed Waits as one of America’s most valuable pop performers, praising him for pushing beyond the formula of his earlier work. Waits himself traced that evolution to years spent listening: working as a nightclub doorman, absorbing the acts from the doorway, and eavesdropping on conversations in all-night diners.
That sense of observation became central to the Waitsian universe—a world populated by cab drivers, night owls, dreamers, hustlers and outsiders, rendered with equal parts tenderness, humor and grit.
Now a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Songwriters, Waits remains an artist with few true comparisons. Fifty years on, Small Change still sounds unmistakably, gloriously Waitsian.
