Blue Valentine by Tom Waits

Blue Valentine, Tom Waits' sixth studio album, rolled out on Asylum on September 5, 1978, after six sessions that summer with producer Bones Howe. Waits was still the barfly poet of the Los Angeles night, and here he leans harder into the blues, trading some of the piano-bar hush for smoky, electric grit while that gravel voice keeps chronicling the people society forgot.

The best proof is right there in the title of "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis", a holiday greeting from someone living far from the Christmas-card ideal, sung with enormous tenderness. Rickie Lee Jones shows up on the back cover, and the record helped build the critical and commercial momentum that had started with Small Change.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.