The beginning of this song is from Ren's point of view of dealing with those thoughts... and it never being the right time. The latter part when everything changes up is about Ren's best friend Joe. Joe had called a mutual friend and she called Ren at 3 in the morning, woke him up. He figured he could walk to the bridge from his house in 10 minutes and run it in 5. Ren kept trying to call Joe as he ran and it rang busy, so he figured that was good. He was almost there when Joe's phone gave an out of service message. He was too late, literally by minutes and blames himself
It's not about being weak or strong, it's a lying voice telling folk they are a burden, that it's an escape from pain. I hope folks hang on, life is ever changing.💖💖💖
This song was always crazy to me because when i was like 13 i went through almost the same exact story, except instead of being 5 min late, fortunately i made it just in time, and after a bit in the hospital....that friend is still alive and doing well today. I cant imagine....
Posted by Ren Ren: Today I want to write something beautiful and eloquent but I’ve been staring at my computer screen for the past 10 minutes blankly. So I’ll just write. Today, the 1st of June is my friend Joe’s birthday. I first met Joe when I was 8 years old, my friend Josh said I had to meet this guy, so we both walked over to his, it took about 10 minutes from my house. I was greeted by this kid covered head to toe in freckles, he grinned at us, climbed onto the back of his sofa and screamed “Swanton Bomb!” then front flipped off the top and landed right onto his back on a stone floor. He lay still for a moment, twitched a few times, then got up, grinned at us, brushed himself off, and did it again. This was Joe. He’d do anything to make people laugh. He ended up becoming one of my best friends. He was there when we stole our first cigarettes out of his mums pack, way too young. He was there when I had my first kiss, with a girl twice my size on the back of the 42 bus. He was there when I first got so drunk I threw up in the woods after drinking as much white lightning Cider as we could. I was there when he did his first backflip on skates, and saw him do a 720 off of the pier cave, that moment became legendary. Joe was the funny one in our friend group, he’d make us laugh till it hurt. No one had a bad word to say about him. It was impossible not to like him. Usually we put celebrities, athletes and actors on pedestals, turn them into role models and admire them from a far. The person I admired was Joe. Him and Sagar knew every word to the songs id write, we’d get drunk at parties and they’d be singing along as loud as they could. It gave me a lot of confidence back then. On Christmas Eve 2010 I was sitting in a pub with Joe, he’d been feeling low after a couple of consecutive break ups. He tried to check himself into a mental health outpatient facility a few weeks earlier but they turned him away because he didn’t have an appointment. He turned to me and said that sometimes he wished he could just walk into the sea and keep walking. He said it in a kind of half joking throw away comment type of way, then took a sip of his drink, walked over to the juke box and put Dig by Incubus on. If I knew that was the last time I’d see Joe id have hugged him, told him how much I loved him, how much I looked up to him, how much we all loved him, and I wouldn’t have left that pub. I didn’t know that, so I finished my drink, said happy Christmas and left. Two nights after Christmas I got woken up by a phone call at 3am, it was my friend Ella. She told me Joe was on the Menai Bridge, a large suspension bridge connecting the main land to the isle of Anglesey where we lived. He’d been on the phone to her in tears saying goodbye. He told her to tell everyone he loved them. I pulled on my clothes as fast as I could and started running toward the bridge. It was up a hill. I lived about a ten minute walk away, I could run it in five. As I ran I started dialling then redialing his number. The line was busy, which was a good sign, it meant he was still on the phone to someone. As I got about halfway, the busy tone changed. It told me the line was out of service. I got a sinking feeling and picked up my speed. I arrived to the bridge minutes after I left my house. It was deafeningly quiet. I was the first person to arrive. I got there probably about 2 minutes too late. Joe’s body was never found. Initially we refused to believe he was gone. The coastguard came out that night, with boats, and helicopters. Me and my friends spent the next 10 days putting up missing posters everywhere we could, walking up and down beaches with flashlights, getting about 3 hours sleep a night. When you’re walking up and down a beach with a torch when its dark everything looks like a body. We still haven’t found Joe. As his birthday came around, I wrote a song, freckled angels, a song I dedicated to Joe which I sang in front of his friends and family. A charity football match was put on for him, raising money for the RNLI where I won two bottles of wine in a raffle, I drank them both as quickly as I could, naturally, turned to my friend and probably slurred something along the lines of “This is the last time I ever drink” That was 12 years ago, I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since. My first ever album I named Freckled Angels in tribute of one of the best people I ever knew. Skip forward some years. I’d been sitting on this song I wrote a few years ago. It always felt a little incomplete. It was going to be my next release, but I was dreading it because of this feeling of incompletion. I decided, very last minute, to do something about it. I sat by my piano, and the rest of the song fell out of me. I hadn’t thought about Joe in a little while, and the song initially wasn’t going to be about him, but the words all fell out of me. I wrote and recorded a whole 2 minutes extra, recording each part as I wrote it. Tears spewing out of my eyes pretty much the whole time, and decided not to do my usual thing of perfecting each line, I just recorded every line as it came. This will be my next release. You can turn on notifications by following the link in the comments below During this campaign I will be raising money for the RNLI, the group of brave men and women who spent hours tirelessly looking for Joe after the night he went missing. I'll also be donating 50% of the profit on all copies of the 'Freckled Angels' album directly to Joes family as a nice surprise gift. I will include links to the RNLI donation page below where 100% of the money will go to support them, I will be travelling to the UK later this month to make a music video, and have carved out a couple of days where I will travel to my home town on the isle of Anglesey to present the royal national lifeboat institution with a cheque of all the money raised.
You guys are two of my favorite reactors. You're both funny and deep thinkers. Usually, don't get both of those. Like the way you guys talk through things, but don't make it boring.
When you really think about it, REN was ON HIS WAY to save his friend who was 10 minutes away… he was 5 minutes too late. His friend’s phone went dead when REN was half way there. Nothing he could have done would have prevented it in that 10 minutes, but I can’t imagine living with that.
Ren posted this under this video on his page about this song: @RenMakesMusic 3 weeks ago Today I want to write something beautiful and eloquent but I’ve been staring at my computer screen for the past 10 minutes blankly. So I’ll just write. Today, the 1st of June is my friend Joe’s birthday. I first met Joe when I was 8 years old, my friend Josh said I had to meet this guy, so we both walked over to his, it took about 10 minutes from my house. I was greeted by this kid covered head to toe in freckles, he grinned at us, climbed onto the back of his sofa and screamed “Swanton Bomb!” then front flipped off the top and landed right onto his back on a stone floor. He lay still for a moment, twitched a few times, then got up, grinned at us, brushed himself off, and did it again. This was Joe. He’d do anything to make people laugh. He ended up becoming one of my best friends. He was there when we stole our first cigarettes out of his mums pack, way too young. He was there when I had my first kiss, with a girl twice my size on the back of the 42 bus. He was there when I first got so drunk I threw up in the woods after drinking as much white lightning Cider as we could. I was there when he did his first backflip on skates, and saw him do a 720 off of the pier cave, that moment became legendary. Joe was the funny one in our friend group, he’d make us laugh till it hurt. No one had a bad word to say about him. It was impossible not to like him. Usually we put celebrities, athletes and actors on pedestals, turn them into role models and admire them from a far. The person I admired was Joe. Him and Sagar knew every word to the songs id write, we’d get drunk at parties and they’d be singing along as loud as they could. It gave me a lot of confidence back then. On Christmas Eve 2010 I was sitting in a pub with Joe, he’d been feeling low after a couple of consecutive break ups. He tried to check himself into a mental health outpatient facility a few weeks earlier but they turned him away because he didn’t have an appointment. He turned to me and said that sometimes he wished he could just walk into the sea and keep walking. He said it in a kind of half joking throw away comment type of way, then took a sip of his drink, walked over to the juke box and put Dig by Incubus on. If I knew that was the last time I’d see Joe id have hugged him, told him how much I loved him, how much I looked up to him, how much we all loved him, and I wouldn’t have left that pub. I didn’t know that, so I finished my drink, said happy Christmas and left. Two nights after Christmas I got woken up by a phone call at 3am, it was my friend Ella. She told me Joe was on the Menai Bridge, a large suspension bridge connecting the main land to the isle of Anglesey where we lived. He’d been on the phone to her in tears saying goodbye. He told her to tell everyone he loved them. I pulled on my clothes as fast as I could and started running toward the bridge. It was up a hill. I lived about a ten minute walk away, I could run it in five. As I ran I started dialling then redialing his number. The line was busy, which was a good sign, it meant he was still on the phone to someone. As I got about halfway, the busy tone changed. It told me the line was out of service. I got a sinking feeling and picked up my speed. I arrived to the bridge minutes after I left my house. It was deafeningly quiet. I was the first person to arrive. I got there probably about 2 minutes too late. Joe’s body was never found. Initially we refused to believe he was gone. The coastguard came out that night, with boats, and helicopters. Me and my friends spent the next 10 days putting up missing posters everywhere we could, walking up and down beaches with flashlights, getting about 3 hours sleep a night. When you’re walking up and down a beach with a torch when its dark everything looks like a body. We still haven’t found Joe. As his birthday came around, I wrote a song, freckled angels, a song I dedicated to Joe which I sang in front of his friends and family. A charity football match was put on for him, raising money for the RNLI where I won two bottles of wine in a raffle, I drank them both as quickly as I could, naturally, turned to my friend and probably slurred something along the lines of “This is the last time I ever drink” That was 12 years ago, I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since. My first ever album I named Freckled Angels in tribute of one of the best people I ever knew. Skip forward some years. I’d been sitting on this song I wrote a few years ago. It always felt a little incomplete. It was going to be my next release, but I was dreading it because of this feeling of incompletion. I decided, very last minute, to do something about it. I sat by my piano, and the rest of the song fell out of me. I hadn’t thought about Joe in a little while, and the song initially wasn’t going to be about him, but the words all fell out of me. I wrote and recorded a whole 2 minutes extra, recording each part as I wrote it. Tears spewing out of my eyes pretty much the whole time, and decided not to do my usual thing of perfecting each line, I just recorded every line as it came. During this campaign I will be raising money for the RNLI, the group of brave men and women who spent hours tirelessly looking for Joe after the night he went missing. I'll also be donating 50% of the profit on all copies of the 'Freckled Angels' album directly to Joes family as a nice surprise gift. I will include links to the RNLI donation page below where 100% of the money will go to support them, I will be travelling to the UK later this month to make a music video, and have carved out a couple of days where I will travel to my home town on the isle of Anglesey to present the royal national lifeboat institution with a cheque of all the money raised. Turn on notifications for the video here: ua-cam.com/video/n3JNtfi4Vb0/v-deo.html Raising money for RNLI : www.justgiving.com/page/ren-gill-1685546882254?Link&/ren-gill-1685546882254& Freckled Angels album: renmakesmerch.com/products/freckled-angels-cd Presave Suic*de: found.ee/ren-suic-de
❤ Thank you for taking this one thoughtfully. Your best reaction so far. I also love the symbolism of the plaster cast as his coping strategy (distance). Instead of putting a Band Aid on it, he had to put something harder & stronger on it ... a cast that tries to set things right and fix what's broken.
I had a friend who died on the operating table during a procedure to remove blood clots from his lungs because our healthcare system didn't view cancer as an "emergency" for years. By the time they got to it, it had spread to his lungs. He was 25 and recently married. He called me the day he was going into surgery, but I was busy and I said to myself, out loud, I'll call him back in a bit. I had no idea he was going in for emergency surgery. A few hours later I checked facebook and saw his wife's post detailing he was gone. It wasn't my fault. Nothing I could have done would have saved his life. I still don't know how to let go of the guilt for not answering that call.
So sorry for your friend, that must’ve been a terrible pain to deal with. I hope you’re progressing well mentally and taking it day by day. Like you said, it’s nothing you could’ve done to save his life but at least the memories y’all made throughout your friendship will always be there, which is a positive! Thanks for Sharing
Without knowing his story you got it. The first part was about his own thoughts and choosing life. When you said domino effect I knew you understood. It’s about his friend Joe. You may be gone, but the effect it has on your loved ones is devastating and permanent, and he wanted to show that with raw emotion, no practicing and retakes, just as he was thinking about it and crying. Ren’s pretty special in how he’s getting people to think and open up.
A reaction video unlike most others as you are both pretty energetic and entertaining, but you both 100% got it correct, and your conversation about how you would handle this situation, or like you also said earlier 'is it a strength or a weakness to do it...' was spot on as well as the margins are just so small (as Ren said expose our fragility) which you also mentioned. The key is to just talk about it which is what we are all doing now so Ren has achieved that with this song, and has remembered his friend Joe as well. Great reaction guys!!!
It takes real men to be in touch with their sensitive side. I love how you guys talk about deep topics and the emotional side of them. Love your reactions 😘 from a renegade
Joe Hughes was one of Ren's best friends from childhood. He sadly took his own life aged 19 (jumping off the Menai Bridge around 3.00 a.m. on 28th December 2010). Ren was running to the bridge to stop him but got there too late - he had already jumped
A person who wants to end it is not necessary looking forward to the death they feel they can't live in this world. Knowing this can help when we help. 🤓🇸🇪
I think this song is for those about to quit it sings of the pain of those left behind by the derly departed. Those who contemplate the abyss with a desire to jump in know that others have it far worse. The jump the escape itself is selfish narcisistic "I quit I'm leaving screw everything, do I suffer most? no but I don't care I'm not taking another minute of this" those who stay are those who think of the pain in those left behind. It feels selfish when you are fed (maybe by your mother as he was fed when sick by his mother) but your nerves won't let you keep the food down you feel like a burden. But knowing the pain in those left behind at times stops the urge to quit. Ren was misdiagnosed a decade ago by doctors. He had Lime Disease, but they thought his mind was playing tricks and gave him strong drugs psychotropics and told him he was crazy. The Lyme disease ran amuck for 7-8 years. He is currently in Canada receiving treatment to undo all the damage done. His life was dramatically shortened by the misdiagnosis, but he is doing his best to stay in shape and recover all the stolen years past & future. Basically, it's LIKE having a broken leg and the Dr telling you it's all in your head and prescribing a bunch of super strong psychotropics for 7-8 years. I saw an interview the NHS would make fun of him for asking for more tests on his blood. They are the pig in his videos.
really confusing listening to this while the background music from your stream is playing alongside it. clashing real bad. not sure if you realised that. you guys are cool reactors though so dont take this as a dig from me pls
Survivor's guilt is the worst, hence why I skip thru parts of this song. It's the worst thing living w/what feels like someone else's soul on your back for as long as you live, it's so much harder than facing your own mortality, coming from someone who's literal older brother ended his own life AND also a chick whom also had to go thru 15 surgeries to save my own life. I'd rather sign that consent waiver saying I know I might die in surgery every day before I could handle another person I love telling me they wanna end their lives & not being able to stop them from doing it.
Just thought you might want to know, that the link to the "original video" in the description leads to Genesis and not the song that's in this video. Otherwise, pretty ok reaction.
I would thumbs up this, but the intro music playing constantly through the entire music vid interferes with the reaction. I cannot even focus on any commentary because of the never-ending intro music. Sorry. Bailing out
BACKGROUND MUSIC STOPS AT 2:32. EDITING ERROR 🤦♂SORRY
Thanks. You should pin this, because I almost bailed, and this is fantastic.
The beginning of this song is from Ren's point of view of dealing with those thoughts... and it never being the right time. The latter part when everything changes up is about Ren's best friend Joe. Joe had called a mutual friend and she called Ren at 3 in the morning, woke him up. He figured he could walk to the bridge from his house in 10 minutes and run it in 5. Ren kept trying to call Joe as he ran and it rang busy, so he figured that was good. He was almost there when Joe's phone gave an out of service message. He was too late, literally by minutes and blames himself
It's not about being weak or strong, it's a lying voice telling folk they are a burden, that it's an escape from pain. I hope folks hang on, life is ever changing.💖💖💖
This song was always crazy to me because when i was like 13 i went through almost the same exact story, except instead of being 5 min late, fortunately i made it just in time, and after a bit in the hospital....that friend is still alive and doing well today. I cant imagine....
Posted by Ren
Ren:
Today I want to write something beautiful and eloquent but I’ve been staring at my computer screen for the past 10 minutes blankly. So I’ll just write.
Today, the 1st of June is my friend Joe’s birthday.
I first met Joe when I was 8 years old, my friend Josh said I had to meet this guy, so we both walked over to his, it took about 10 minutes from my house. I was greeted by this kid covered head to toe in freckles, he grinned at us, climbed onto the back of his sofa and screamed “Swanton Bomb!” then front flipped off the top and landed right onto his back on a stone floor. He lay still for a moment, twitched a few times, then got up, grinned at us, brushed himself off, and did it again.
This was Joe. He’d do anything to make people laugh. He ended up becoming one of my best friends. He was there when we stole our first cigarettes out of his mums pack, way too young. He was there when I had my first kiss, with a girl twice my size on the back of the 42 bus. He was there when I first got so drunk I threw up in the woods after drinking as much white lightning Cider as we could. I was there when he did his first backflip on skates, and saw him do a 720 off of the pier cave, that moment became legendary.
Joe was the funny one in our friend group, he’d make us laugh till it hurt. No one had a bad word to say about him. It was impossible not to like him. Usually we put celebrities, athletes and actors on pedestals, turn them into role models and admire them from a far. The person I admired was Joe.
Him and Sagar knew every word to the songs id write, we’d get drunk at parties and they’d be singing along as loud as they could. It gave me a lot of confidence back then.
On Christmas Eve 2010 I was sitting in a pub with Joe, he’d been feeling low after a couple of consecutive break ups. He tried to check himself into a mental health outpatient facility a few weeks earlier but they turned him away because he didn’t have an appointment. He turned to me and said that sometimes he wished he could just walk into the sea and keep walking. He said it in a kind of half joking throw away comment type of way, then took a sip of his drink, walked over to the juke box and put Dig by Incubus on. If I knew that was the last time I’d see Joe id have hugged him, told him how much I loved him, how much I looked up to him, how much we all loved him, and I wouldn’t have left that pub. I didn’t know that, so I finished my drink, said happy Christmas and left.
Two nights after Christmas I got woken up by a phone call at 3am, it was my friend Ella. She told me Joe was on the Menai Bridge, a large suspension bridge connecting the main land to the isle of Anglesey where we lived. He’d been on the phone to her in tears saying goodbye. He told her to tell everyone he loved them. I pulled on my clothes as fast as I could and started running toward the bridge. It was up a hill. I lived about a ten minute walk away, I could run it in five. As I ran I started dialling then redialing his number. The line was busy, which was a good sign, it meant he was still on the phone to someone. As I got about halfway, the busy tone changed. It told me the line was out of service. I got a sinking feeling and picked up my speed. I arrived to the bridge minutes after I left my house. It was deafeningly quiet. I was the first person to arrive. I got there probably about 2 minutes too late.
Joe’s body was never found.
Initially we refused to believe he was gone. The coastguard came out that night, with boats, and helicopters. Me and my friends spent the next 10 days putting up missing posters everywhere we could, walking up and down beaches with flashlights, getting about 3 hours sleep a night. When you’re walking up and down a beach with a torch when its dark everything looks like a body. We still haven’t found Joe.
As his birthday came around, I wrote a song, freckled angels, a song I dedicated to Joe which I sang in front of his friends and family. A charity football match was put on for him, raising money for the RNLI where I won two bottles of wine in a raffle, I drank them both as quickly as I could, naturally, turned to my friend and probably slurred something along the lines of “This is the last time I ever drink” That was 12 years ago, I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since.
My first ever album I named Freckled Angels in tribute of one of the best people I ever knew.
Skip forward some years. I’d been sitting on this song I wrote a few years ago. It always felt a little incomplete. It was going to be my next release, but I was dreading it because of this feeling of incompletion. I decided, very last minute, to do something about it. I sat by my piano, and the rest of the song fell out of me. I hadn’t thought about Joe in a little while, and the song initially wasn’t going to be about him, but the words all fell out of me. I wrote and recorded a whole 2 minutes extra, recording each part as I wrote it. Tears spewing out of my eyes pretty much the whole time, and decided not to do my usual thing of perfecting each line, I just recorded every line as it came. This will be my next release. You can turn on notifications by following the link in the comments below
During this campaign I will be raising money for the RNLI, the group of brave men and women who spent hours tirelessly looking for Joe after the night he went missing. I'll also be donating 50% of the profit on all copies of the 'Freckled Angels' album directly to Joes family as a nice surprise gift. I will include links to the RNLI donation page below where 100% of the money will go to support them, I will be travelling to the UK later this month to make a music video, and have carved out a couple of days where I will travel to my home town on the isle of Anglesey to present the royal national lifeboat institution with a cheque of all the money raised.
You guys are two of my favorite reactors. You're both funny and deep thinkers. Usually, don't get both of those. Like the way you guys talk through things, but don't make it boring.
When you really think about it, REN was ON HIS WAY to save his friend who was 10 minutes away… he was 5 minutes too late. His friend’s phone went dead when REN was half way there. Nothing he could have done would have prevented it in that 10 minutes, but I can’t imagine living with that.
Ren posted this under this video on his page about this song:
@RenMakesMusic
3 weeks ago
Today I want to write something beautiful and eloquent but I’ve been staring at my computer screen for the past 10 minutes blankly. So I’ll just write.
Today, the 1st of June is my friend Joe’s birthday.
I first met Joe when I was 8 years old, my friend Josh said I had to meet this guy, so we both walked over to his, it took about 10 minutes from my house. I was greeted by this kid covered head to toe in freckles, he grinned at us, climbed onto the back of his sofa and screamed “Swanton Bomb!” then front flipped off the top and landed right onto his back on a stone floor. He lay still for a moment, twitched a few times, then got up, grinned at us, brushed himself off, and did it again.
This was Joe. He’d do anything to make people laugh. He ended up becoming one of my best friends. He was there when we stole our first cigarettes out of his mums pack, way too young. He was there when I had my first kiss, with a girl twice my size on the back of the 42 bus. He was there when I first got so drunk I threw up in the woods after drinking as much white lightning Cider as we could. I was there when he did his first backflip on skates, and saw him do a 720 off of the pier cave, that moment became legendary.
Joe was the funny one in our friend group, he’d make us laugh till it hurt. No one had a bad word to say about him. It was impossible not to like him. Usually we put celebrities, athletes and actors on pedestals, turn them into role models and admire them from a far. The person I admired was Joe.
Him and Sagar knew every word to the songs id write, we’d get drunk at parties and they’d be singing along as loud as they could. It gave me a lot of confidence back then.
On Christmas Eve 2010 I was sitting in a pub with Joe, he’d been feeling low after a couple of consecutive break ups. He tried to check himself into a mental health outpatient facility a few weeks earlier but they turned him away because he didn’t have an appointment. He turned to me and said that sometimes he wished he could just walk into the sea and keep walking. He said it in a kind of half joking throw away comment type of way, then took a sip of his drink, walked over to the juke box and put Dig by Incubus on. If I knew that was the last time I’d see Joe id have hugged him, told him how much I loved him, how much I looked up to him, how much we all loved him, and I wouldn’t have left that pub. I didn’t know that, so I finished my drink, said happy Christmas and left.
Two nights after Christmas I got woken up by a phone call at 3am, it was my friend Ella. She told me Joe was on the Menai Bridge, a large suspension bridge connecting the main land to the isle of Anglesey where we lived. He’d been on the phone to her in tears saying goodbye. He told her to tell everyone he loved them. I pulled on my clothes as fast as I could and started running toward the bridge. It was up a hill. I lived about a ten minute walk away, I could run it in five. As I ran I started dialling then redialing his number. The line was busy, which was a good sign, it meant he was still on the phone to someone. As I got about halfway, the busy tone changed. It told me the line was out of service. I got a sinking feeling and picked up my speed. I arrived to the bridge minutes after I left my house. It was deafeningly quiet. I was the first person to arrive. I got there probably about 2 minutes too late.
Joe’s body was never found.
Initially we refused to believe he was gone. The coastguard came out that night, with boats, and helicopters. Me and my friends spent the next 10 days putting up missing posters everywhere we could, walking up and down beaches with flashlights, getting about 3 hours sleep a night. When you’re walking up and down a beach with a torch when its dark everything looks like a body. We still haven’t found Joe.
As his birthday came around, I wrote a song, freckled angels, a song I dedicated to Joe which I sang in front of his friends and family. A charity football match was put on for him, raising money for the RNLI where I won two bottles of wine in a raffle, I drank them both as quickly as I could, naturally, turned to my friend and probably slurred something along the lines of “This is the last time I ever drink” That was 12 years ago, I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since.
My first ever album I named Freckled Angels in tribute of one of the best people I ever knew.
Skip forward some years. I’d been sitting on this song I wrote a few years ago. It always felt a little incomplete. It was going to be my next release, but I was dreading it because of this feeling of incompletion. I decided, very last minute, to do something about it. I sat by my piano, and the rest of the song fell out of me. I hadn’t thought about Joe in a little while, and the song initially wasn’t going to be about him, but the words all fell out of me. I wrote and recorded a whole 2 minutes extra, recording each part as I wrote it. Tears spewing out of my eyes pretty much the whole time, and decided not to do my usual thing of perfecting each line, I just recorded every line as it came.
During this campaign I will be raising money for the RNLI, the group of brave men and women who spent hours tirelessly looking for Joe after the night he went missing. I'll also be donating 50% of the profit on all copies of the 'Freckled Angels' album directly to Joes family as a nice surprise gift. I will include links to the RNLI donation page below where 100% of the money will go to support them, I will be travelling to the UK later this month to make a music video, and have carved out a couple of days where I will travel to my home town on the isle of Anglesey to present the royal national lifeboat institution with a cheque of all the money raised.
Turn on notifications for the video here: ua-cam.com/video/n3JNtfi4Vb0/v-deo.html
Raising money for RNLI :
www.justgiving.com/page/ren-gill-1685546882254?Link&/ren-gill-1685546882254&
Freckled Angels album: renmakesmerch.com/products/freckled-angels-cd
Presave Suic*de: found.ee/ren-suic-de
It's the greatest and most powerful song that I don't want on my Playlist. Which makes it a masterpiece.
Indeed!
❤ Thank you for taking this one thoughtfully. Your best reaction so far. I also love the symbolism of the plaster cast as his coping strategy (distance). Instead of putting a Band Aid on it, he had to put something harder & stronger on it ... a cast that tries to set things right and fix what's broken.
I had a friend who died on the operating table during a procedure to remove blood clots from his lungs because our healthcare system didn't view cancer as an "emergency" for years. By the time they got to it, it had spread to his lungs. He was 25 and recently married. He called me the day he was going into surgery, but I was busy and I said to myself, out loud, I'll call him back in a bit. I had no idea he was going in for emergency surgery. A few hours later I checked facebook and saw his wife's post detailing he was gone.
It wasn't my fault. Nothing I could have done would have saved his life. I still don't know how to let go of the guilt for not answering that call.
So sorry for your friend, that must’ve been a terrible pain to deal with. I hope you’re progressing well mentally and taking it day by day. Like you said, it’s nothing you could’ve done to save his life but at least the memories y’all made throughout your friendship will always be there, which is a positive! Thanks for Sharing
Great reaction guy's, you definitely captured the emotions in this track. RIP JOE HUGHES 🖤
Without knowing his story you got it. The first part was about his own thoughts and choosing life. When you said domino effect I knew you understood. It’s about his friend Joe. You may be gone, but the effect it has on your loved ones is devastating and permanent, and he wanted to show that with raw emotion, no practicing and retakes, just as he was thinking about it and crying. Ren’s pretty special in how he’s getting people to think and open up.
A reaction video unlike most others as you are both pretty energetic and entertaining, but you both 100% got it correct, and your conversation about how you would handle this situation, or like you also said earlier 'is it a strength or a weakness to do it...' was spot on as well as the margins are just so small (as Ren said expose our fragility) which you also mentioned.
The key is to just talk about it which is what we are all doing now so Ren has achieved that with this song, and has remembered his friend Joe as well.
Great reaction guys!!!
Couldn't have said it better 📍👌
It takes real men to be in touch with their sensitive side. I love how you guys talk about deep topics and the emotional side of them. Love your reactions 😘 from a renegade
I really appreciate your thoughtful and empathetic reaction.
RIP Joe 💔🥲
Joe Hughes was one of Ren's best friends from childhood. He sadly took his own life aged 19 (jumping off the Menai Bridge around 3.00 a.m. on 28th December 2010). Ren was running to the bridge to stop him but got there too late - he had already jumped
A person who wants to end it is not necessary looking forward to the death they feel they can't live in this world. Knowing this can help when we help.
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Great reaction as always my guys. Tough subject but you put some great perspective into it. Peace
Enjoying your Ren journey
I think this song is for those about to quit it sings of the pain of those left behind by the derly departed. Those who contemplate the abyss with a desire to jump in know that others have it far worse. The jump the escape itself is selfish narcisistic "I quit I'm leaving screw everything, do I suffer most? no but I don't care I'm not taking another minute of this" those who stay are those who think of the pain in those left behind. It feels selfish when you are fed (maybe by your mother as he was fed when sick by his mother) but your nerves won't let you keep the food down you feel like a burden. But knowing the pain in those left behind at times stops the urge to quit.
Ren was misdiagnosed a decade ago by doctors. He had Lime Disease, but they thought his mind was playing tricks and gave him strong drugs psychotropics and told him he was crazy. The Lyme disease ran amuck for 7-8 years. He is currently in Canada receiving treatment to undo all the damage done. His life was dramatically shortened by the misdiagnosis, but he is doing his best to stay in shape and recover all the stolen years past & future. Basically, it's LIKE having a broken leg and the Dr telling you it's all in your head and prescribing a bunch of super strong psychotropics for 7-8 years. I saw an interview the NHS would make fun of him for asking for more tests on his blood. They are the pig in his videos.
We just watched you get a Ren therapy session. They're great aren't they? Salute!
Hey. Brother.
Im. Glad you made it safe ! God has a place for you In this life !
Great video and loved your commentary about this song .
Great Job. 😊😊
You should do Power, it'd again different from all the others and also my personal favorite.
Nicely done guys.
Loved your reaction. Y'all have to do Ren's "Losing It", definitely a different vibe than this and you will be losing it
really confusing listening to this while the background music from your stream is playing alongside it. clashing real bad. not sure if you realised that. you guys are cool reactors though so dont take this as a dig from me pls
Survivor's guilt is the worst, hence why I skip thru parts of this song. It's the worst thing living w/what feels like someone else's soul on your back for as long as you live, it's so much harder than facing your own mortality, coming from someone who's literal older brother ended his own life AND also a chick whom also had to go thru 15 surgeries to save my own life. I'd rather sign that consent waiver saying I know I might die in surgery every day before I could handle another person I love telling me they wanna end their lives & not being able to stop them from doing it.
Just thought you might want to know, that the link to the "original video" in the description leads to Genesis and not the song that's in this video. Otherwise, pretty ok reaction.
it appears to have been fixed, it leads to the original video now.
#RenRules #RenÅgades #RenEgades
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I would thumbs up this, but the intro music playing constantly through the entire music vid interferes with the reaction. I cannot even focus on any commentary because of the never-ending intro music. Sorry. Bailing out
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