Tom Waits - Small Change (Turquoise Vinyl)

50th Anniversary 180 Gram Opaque Turquoise Vinyl LP

Anti- marks fifty years of Small Change with this 180 gram pressing on opaque turquoise vinyl, issued October 2, 2026 with the original eleven-song sequence intact: five songs on side one, six on side two. The label announced the reissue with a newly surfaced clip of Waits performing "The Piano Has Been Drinking" on Fernwood Tonight, Martin Mull's 1970s talk show.

Small Change was Waits's fourth studio album, first issued by Asylum in 1976. Producer Bones Howe recorded it at Wally Heider's Studio 3 in Hollywood in July 1976, direct to two-track stereo tape, with Waits and the musicians playing and singing together in one room. Howe has said he set up the sessions "the same way I used to make jazz records in the 1950s." Shelly Manne played drums, Jim Hughart bass and Lew Tabackin tenor saxophone, with a string section arranged and conducted by Jerry Yester and led by concertmaster Harry Bluestone.

The songs came out of Waits's nights in Los Angeles. "I got a job as doorman at a night club in L.A., and I listened to all the acts from the door," he said of that period, and he was also "picking up people's conversations in all-night coffee shops." Small Change was his first album to enter the Billboard 200, where it peaked at No. 89, and it has since been certified Gold in Australia and Silver in the UK. Rod Stewart later recorded "Tom Traubert's Blues," and the saxophone from the title track was used for the opening of BBC Two's Moviedrome in 1988.

Tracklist

Side One

1. Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)
2. Step Right Up
3. Jitterbug Boy (Sharing a Curbstone with Chuck E. Weiss, Robert Marchese, Paul Body and the Mug and Artie)
4. I Wish I Was in New Orleans (In the Ninth Ward)
5. The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King)

Side Two

1. Invitation to the Blues
2. Pasties and a G-String (At the Two O'Clock Club)
3. Bad Liver and a Broken Heart (In Lowell)
4. The One That Got Away
5. Small Change (Got Rained on with His Own .38)
6. I Can't Wait to Get Off Work (And See My Baby on Montgomery Avenue)

Complete the Collection

Also from Tom Waits at Evergreen Vinyl, seven titles with this LP: The Heart Of Saturday Night, Nighthawks At The Diner, One From The Heart, Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years, Glitter And Doom Live.