Let’s Just Talk – Rusty Reid Revives A Lost Rock Moment

A song rescued from its own silence

I’ve come across plenty of songs over the years. Songs that arrived late and made sense only with time. Let’s Just Talk by Rusty Reid belongs to that category. Recorded in the early 1980s and left unreleased for decades, the track now steps into daylight as the third single from The Unreasonables, the album finally released at the end of August 2025. Listening to it, I kept thinking about timing – how certain songs wait for the right moment, or maybe for listeners mature enough to hear them properly.

If this album had come out forty years ago, I’d have been a ten-year-old kid, already tuned in and ready for it – my mum had done the work early, planting music in me through stacks of vinyl that played day after day at home.

Pop jangle, tension, and the step forward

Musically, Let’s Just Talk leans into pop-jangle and New-Wave-tinted rock, bright guitars bringing a sense of fragility beneath the melody. The song circles a familiar human moment: early intimacy, attraction mixed with hesitation, the usual negotiation before anything physical happens. The central question-“How can I tell how far you want to go?” – comes as an honest thought rather than a crafted hook. The arrangement grows patiently, and the bridge delivers the release it promises.

The words at the centre

The lyrics do the real work here:“Wait a minute, I don’t know / If I want to hold you this way yet” opens the song with a palpable pause. That idea of not having “learned my lines to this play yet” frames intimacy as something fragile, guided by what didn’t go right before. When the chorus arrives – Let’s just talk – it works like a sure hand, buying time instead of pushing forward. I’m drawn to “Your eyes are searing but they don’t show me where / You want my hand to be placed next”. Desire and uncertainty sharing the same shelve, wild and human.

Rusty Reid and the long road here

Rusty Reid’s background matters here. A fifth-generation Texan raised on wide-open radio playlists and classic American songwriting, he later crossed Nashville, Los Angeles, Houston, and eventually the Pacific Northwest, carrying those places into his writing. The Unreasonables captures a side of him rooted in direct rock energy, recorded long ago with a tight Houston band and finally given its due.

I admire the restraint in this album – the confidence to pause, to ask, to listen. And yeah, please listen and read. It’s worth your time. I spent a good while reading Rusty Reid’s biography and it played out like a long western movie – and believe me, Karl May felt like my best childhood friend.

The weight of Rusty Reid sits somewhere between the details and the waiting. If you want the full picture behind his life, his music, and the road that led here, you can follow Rusty Reid and dig deeper into his work on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Bandcamp. It’s worth your time again.

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