"Small Change", in my opinion, is the finest addition to the Tom Waits cannon, and the best example I can think of of an album that consistently showcases brilliant songwriting. The quality never wavers, and the tone is more personal than on many other Waits albums. The result is a bar-stool confessional, life as seen through the whisky glass; hard luck stories told for anybody who cares to listen...all to a soundtrack that is both bluesy, jazzy, and beatnik-funky. Wait's pre-eminence as a writer has long earned him kudos from more prominent artists, and the classic opener on this album ("Tom Traubert's Blues") gave Rod Stewart (a confirmed Waits fan) an unlikely chart hit a few years back. This is a sorry, booze-soaked tale of unrequited love, underpinned by a lush, stringed arrangement that lends it a festive air, which wouldn't seem out of place on Heart Attack and Vine. Next up is the beat-poet satire on the mania of commerce that is "Step Right Up"...here Waits adopts the voice of a "closing down, everything must go" salesperson of irrelevant specificity - the song's all-embracing intentions are brilliantly inscribed with a wonderfully timed bit of scat singing as Waits recites "that's right you too can be the proud owner of this quality hoosay boosing boosong..!!" Classic. Waits wouldn't look out of place in the company of the contemporary literati. "Jitterbug Boy" is another boozy confessional, with Waits's down-on-his-luck narrator sounding as though he'd had a few too many before collaring a bar neighbour to spew out some unlikely stories to ("once upon a time I was in showbiz too..")...a similar tone but possibly even more pathetic (and beautiful sounding) lament arrives later with "Bad liver and a broken heart". In this, another alcoholic, sorry tale of unrequited love, Waits muses on the girl who "tore him apart", and in just a couple of pointed metaphors conveys a girl to die for: "she was sharp as a razor, and soft as a prayer." All the songs on this album are worth a mention. "The piano has been drinking" (not me!) is an hilarious description of a shabby late night boozer in a series of compressed metaphors ("the spotlight looks like a prizon break") in which the singer subtly suggests that maybe he is as lurid as everything else about the place; and yet comes out of it engagingly qualified in a turn of phrase as comic as it is acerbic ("the owner is a mental midget with the IQ of a fencepost".) This is a truly great album, at turns moving, funny, voyeuristic (witness the leering narrator of the album's second beat poem, "Pasties and a G-String", in which he confesses "I'm getting harder than Chinese Algebra" whilst ogling over strippers in a - you've guessed it - late night joint.) Overall, "Small Change" is an ingeniously written, booze-soaked love-poem to the late night wino life of the big American cities - by the unlikeliest crooner of them all.
