Small Change (Tom Waits album)
| Small Change | ||||
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| Studio album by Tom Waits | ||||
| Released | September 1976 | |||
| Recorded | July 15, 1976 – July 29, 1976 | |||
| Studio | Wally Heider Studios, Hollywood, California | |||
| Genre | Jazz, folk rock | |||
| Length | 49:28 | |||
| Label | Asylum | |||
| Producer | Bones Howe | |||
| Tom Waits chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
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| Mojo | |
| The Rolling Stone Album Guide |  |
Small Change is the third studio album by Tom Waits, released in 1976 on Asylum Records. It was recorded in July 1976.
Small Change was recorded, direct to 2-track stereo tape, July 15, 19-21 and 29, 1976 at the Wally Heider Recording Studio, in Hollywood, USA under the production of Bones Howe.
The album featured famed drummer Shelly Manne, and was, like Waits' previous albums, heavily jazz-influenced, with a lyrical style that owed influence to Raymond Chandler and Charles Bukowski as well as a vocal delivery influenced by Louis Armstrong, Dr. John and Howlin' Wolf. The music, for the most part, consists of Waits' hoarse, rough voice, set against a backdrop of piano, upright bass, drums and saxophone. Some tracks have a string section, whose sweet timbre is starkly contrasted to Waits' voice.
"Tom Traubert's Blues" opens the album. Jay S. Jacobs has described the song as a "stunning opener [which] sets the tone for what follows." The refrain is based almost word by word on the 1890 Australian song, "Waltzing Matilda" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson, although the tune is slightly different.
The origin of the song is somewhat ambiguous. The sub-title of the track "Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen" seems to indicate that it is about a time that Waits spent in Copenhagen in 1976 while on a tour. There, he apparently met Danish singer Mathilde Bondo. Indeed, in a 1998 radio interview, she confirmed that she met Waits and that they spent a night on the town together. Waits himself described the song's subject during a concert in Sydney Australia in March 1979: "Uh, well I met this girl named Matilda. And uh, I had a little too much to drink that night. This is about throwing up in a foreign country." In an interview on NPR's World Cafe, aired December 15, 2006, Waits stated that Tom Traubert was a "friend of a friend" who died in prison.
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