Tom Waits – Small Change

Tom Waits was for a decade or so, an artist of transitions. From his first album until Small Change, he sounded like an artist trying to find his voice. On Small Change we finally find everything he was trying to do achieved. He finds a perfect balance between arrangement and delivery, where his technique might have felt more jarring or juxtaposed on former albums. Unfortunately, he found his sound at the bottom of a whisky bottle, but at least he was able to get out of the habit and regain control. When all is said and done here we have Waits truly creating an American sound, that is clearly influenced by others that came before him, but he now sounds like his own artist, singular and defined. Again my opinion, but I feel like immediately after Small Change, he started searching for a new sound, and again was an artist in transition. He'd keep trying to go deeper and zanier, and again things would feel out of place until he finally reached his new sound with Swordfishtrombones, and from that point onward he never looked back. But when considering Phase 1 of Tom Waits (if you can think of him in such a way), Small Change was the pinnacle of that sound.