Ren Breaks Us AGAIN! Ren "Su!cIde" (First Reaction) - Paul And Tim Do A Thing

[@JohnGatesIII]

This song is referencing Joe Hughes, Ren's best friend. Here's what Ren wrote, on Joe's birthday anniversary: 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 mum's 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 mainland 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 dialing 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.

[@PaulAndTimDoAThing]

That's heartbreaking! Thank you for posting this though!

[@lemurlink3779]

Love your reaction videos! I'd recommend Power or What You Want for your next Ren

[@PaulAndTimDoAThing]

Those two aren't on the list yet but you WILL get more Ren from us in a couple of weeks and he is coming out with a brand new video this week so we need to fit that into our schedule too.

[@jamesdoherty6558]

great upload guys , thanks.

[@PaulAndTimDoAThing]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@truthseeker6046]

Ren makes the entire Internet cry, y’all. 😉 You’re in good company! New sub… 🙋🏻‍♀️ I came for the Ren - staying because you get it. Hang in there! Losing It will cleanse your palates! 😂

[@PaulAndTimDoAThing]

Welcome in! Hope you like the vibe around here! More Ren coming real soon!

[@KittyInTheGarden]

He did a further song called For Joe, which incorporates the last part of Su!c!de and then goes on to add a more resolved and accepting view developed in the 13 years since then. He performed it live. Another song which I didn't think could be performed live is Animal Flow, but he really transforms the song to play it just on guitar and I actually prefer the stripped back version

[@CelticFrost666]

Newest Upload from Ren - "For Joe" is kind of a live version of "Suicide"

[@PaulAndTimDoAThing]

I don't know if I can handle this again lol

[@LilythVT]

OK so happy Ren or fun Ren, Illest of our time is fun and so is Animal Flow. They are newer too. This one killed me. I must have watched a hundred reactions and cried every time. So sad. Great reaction guys.

[@PaulAndTimDoAThing]

I don't know if I can handle another sad one till I get a happy one next lol

[@LilythVT]

@@PaulAndTimDoAThing haha I hear that. I think Illest of our time is a good one, won't make you sad. Animal flow won't either. That one's kinda just weird but cool. Those are safe! Ren does a good job at ripping ppl apart lol

[@LilythVT]

@@PaulAndTimDoAThing though... Chalk outlines with chinchilla is amazing but it may make you said. Still highly recommend!

[@sketchtherapy1218]

Loosing it is funny.

[@PaulAndTimDoAThing]

You'll see it in a couple of weeks