This song is amazing. ;…
I can see your light, it glows through your emotion and expression. The word suicide is blocked online because governments and media have a lot to be answerable too. RIP to all our friends
I honestly can’t believe that YOU didn’t say the word instead of “unalive.” I hate that word so much. Thank you!
Thank you for your thoughtful and insightful comments …
That is my job, all day. Becoming a crisis therapist has been the most rewarding position I’ve had. I’ve lost friends and family to suic!de. I, myself, am a survivor of suic!de. I think you’re correct in that it’s not said enough. People treat it like it’s Voldemort. I believe the more we talk about, the less power it will have over people. Learning to understand their triggers, their warning signs. Know their little things that keep them holding on everyday, know those life Preservers that they have, people who can bring them back from the edge. Safety planning, therapy, exercise all help manage those thoughts. I don’t think they ever actually go away. They hide in corners in your mind and pop out suddenly. But you can learn to manage them when they do, so they don’t have power. REN is awesome at allowing us to see his hurt and his feelings. I love listening to him.
For Joe / and freckle angles a must
Imagine a world where technology was put back into the hands of the users, instead of misguided leaders whose only purpose is to take from you (Money Game 3).
I’ve said it countless times, but Ren is the most important person right and deserves everything and more from what he has done and continues to do .I am surprised you didn’t pick up on the line “My skin felt counterfeit. Silicone rubber” one of many powerful lines though
In case you hadn’t seen, below is what Ren posted on the video before is was premiered, explaining the meaning as well as the steps he was taking with the release of the song.
@RenMakesMusic
10 months 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.
Ren is a gift and I am so glad you have found him
I was suicidal for a year in 2021 (and probably longer than that, without realizing it). I was born with a heart condition, and at 20 I had an unrelated aneurysm which made me have 2 more open heart surgeries. since 2012 I have been on blood thinners for an artificial aortic valve and in 2021 I actively stopped taking my medication thinking if I got a blood clot I’d die quickly and it could be accident. but it was planned. I was lucky enough and worked hard enough to get into a situation where I could get and accept help. Then a year ago I was doing great, but I was on vacation and out of my routines and not paying attention and I forgot my medication. for 9 days I didn’t take it. But I realized on a plane on the 9th day, I forgot. But I thought a year before I went 4 months, it’s been 9 days, I’ll take the medicine when I land and I’ll be fine. I had a stoke in the airport from a blood clot that could have been prevented. This was last year and I am still recovering, and everyday I see the faces of those I hurt by not taking my medicine, even if it was unintentional at that time. I haven’t missed a dose since.
Suicide can be helped. Death is not something to take lightly.
Thanks for letting people use your platform in the comments.
Thank you for this reaction. I lost my brother to Suicide a couple of years back. I stumbled across Ren not long after and his music helped me process my grief. This very powerful song came along later but it tore open a whole torrent of emotions for me again and continues to do so with every re-listen.
Thank you so much for stating that because I have been dealing with depression for years now and I am in therapy now but I have attempted suicide 15 times and never did anyone who was in my life try to talk to me and see what the problem was and I know from experience that 100% of the time that when you are going through something so hard that you feel like suicide is the only answer what you really need is for someone anyone to just listen to you and talk to you and try to figure out what is going on with you and that is the problem with the majority of suicides no one took the time to just listen. Thanks for pointing that out Taylor palmbry that means so much to me
Ren has healed me a hundred times over and I didn’t even realise just how much I was broken.
I am not a cryer, but this song gives me that choking feeling in my throat and my eyes tense up ready for the tears that never come.
I have lost 2 friends to suicide and this just hits so hard.
your reaction made me want to come through the screen and comfort you
I have lost 4 friends to suicide and the guilt is so tough to live with and thought about IiT many times. One friend was drunk at a party and I gave him a ride home and and hid his car keys from him and left and latter he shot himself in front of his family and neighbors
the hurt in that ending damn first time seeing it
Thank you so much for sharing. Seriously, thank you.
I found ren by a friend to help me deal with the depression from losing my mom and being alone now. And this helped me show the pain i would cause those i call friends
What is the purpose of life ?
…listen freckled angels by ren.
Thank you.