Violet is blue ... The terrible beauty in Ren's wasteland
Profanity and celebration of a broken-down brain
We all get p*ssed off at times. It's a chemical thing.
But sometimes it gets some people like a thundering freight train.
And for these people it's not - to use an old analogy - that they've just run out of steam. No, for them, they become a pile of broken bones and livid flesh by the side of the track in the middle of nowhere.
Ren Eryn Gill is a Welsh songwriter, musician, rapper, producer and director, once a member of the indie hip-hop band Trick The Fox and The Big Push.
And, by all accounts, he has fallen by the tracks often… for instance he was misdiagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome and bipolar disorder when, in fact, he was suffering from Lyme disease.
And that led to major depression.
Then right in the middle of it all one of his best friends committed suicide.
His freight train came off the rails.
And yet his beautiful profane, profound music and these, elegant and evocative videos put him back on the right tracks and gave him a fan base of millions.
He spins his nightmare reports from the edge of sanity against a sumptuous strings, piano and bass backing that keeps you searching in metaphorical dark.
I've fallen off the train often over the decades and ended up in these strange ugly towns. I stumbled into Addiction and stayed there for decades. I had some good friends there too, or so I thought …
Alcohol, a party of the like minded called Drugs, then there was Sex and Gluttony.
But I never dropped off at Suicide, although I always knew it was just another slow train waiting up around the bend for me.
Today, I'm okay and can take most of what is thrown at me…
But Ren with a vocabulary which turns the vinyl blue, a voice that gives Jeff Buckley a run for his money and look that pays homage to Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders is a mental, literary and caring face for our future …
#ren #rengill #music #indy #jeffbuckley #streets #suicide #addiction by