Tom Wachunas - Spare Changes (2021)

Tom Wachunas – Spare Changes is by far one of the best (and unknown/underappreciated) singer-songwriter records ever made. Classifying the album within a specific genre is a terribly difficult feat – acid folk? folk rock? psychedelic? A true cornucopia of instrumentation – sax, vibes, kalimba, tabla, guitars, accordion(!) and introspective lyrics. Imagine being on a Caribbean cruise ship in 1975, and Neil Young happens to be croonin’ with a 12 piece band on some new material that never saw the light of day.

Recorded in Columbus, Ohio USA in 1975 at the now-defunct Owl Recording Studios, Spare Changes was actually Tom Wachunas’s graduation project for his Masters in Fine Arts from The Ohio State University. Extremely rare – only 1,000 copies of the original pressing were manufactured.