There’s a specific kind of bleak bartering that happens at 2 AM, and Rusty Reid’s single “Piece of the Action” builds a whole four-minute economy around it. This isn’t a song about the sweeping grandeur of romance; it’s a clinical look at turning “dissatisfaction” into “a transaction of love.” The language is deliberate, almost like a contract being signed on a napkin under a dim light, stripping the act of any pretense other than a desperate, primal exchange.
The song’s devastating thesis arrives with a line that stopped me cold: “I have found through endless searching, you can’t get closer when you’re touching.” Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about music, but about those high-school physics diagrams where atoms are revealed to be 99.9% empty space. Two hands clasp, but what is actually meeting? A universe of nothing, pushing against another universe of nothing. That is the profound, aching loneliness Reid captures here—physicality as a confirmation of distance, not a bridge across it.
What’s clever is how the song clothes this existential hollowness. The sound is pure rock and roll bravado—a muscular, hip-swinging strut that feels like it should be soundtracking a confident conquest. Instead, it underscores a great and tragic performance. The music swaggers, but the lyrics confess the swagger is a lie, a temporary balm for an internal wound that physical contact only irritates further. The satisfaction achieved is momentary and only serves to highlight the emotional deficit.
It’s the sound of a bruise forming in real-time, but does the ache ever teach the lesson?
