The title of Rusty Reid’s new single, “Attitude Change,” has the sterile ring of a corporate warning, which makes the desperate, heart-on-the-floor plea within it all the more jarring. This is the sound of the final straw, a melodic ultimatum delivered while someone else in the room is looking at the baby, or the TV, or anywhere but at the person whose love is visibly fraying at the edges. Reid’s guitar-driven rock is bright and insistent, a direct contradiction to the suffocating neglect being described.
There’s a moment in the song that short-circuited my brain. The narrator, mid-ultimatum, confesses: “two times two / I fell in love three times more with you.” It’s beautifully incorrect math. The kind of faulty emotional accounting that happens when love and exasperation occupy the same space. For a second, I didn’t hear a guitar; I saw the clicking, confused beads of an old abacus trying to calculate a feeling. The logic is a mess, and that’s precisely why it feels so true.
This song isn’t a ballad of sorrow; it’s a frustrated anthem of thwarted desire. As a preview of an album supposedly about raw, primal things, it works perfectly. It’s catchy enough to get stuck in your head, carrRusty Reidying a Trojan horse of domestic desperation inside its hook-laden shell. You could tap your foot to this, right up until you realize it’s the sound of a connection on life support.
What kind of silence follows a demand like that—the healing kind, or the one that confirms it was already too late?
