It all starts with a simple wish — to leave some light behind you.
Andrii has lived his whole life in Western Ukraine. Serving people took him through almost every region of that land — from Sniatyn in the Carpathian foothills to Rozhyshche in Volhynia, by way of Stryi near Lviv and Irshava in Transcarpathia. Those roads, villages and people settled in his heart for good, and later spoke up in his songs — in love for his homeland, for home, for the quiet wonder of an ordinary day. “Towns and villages are the traces of the souls who loved this land”, he would write about that country later. And the same devotion to people is what you hear in every one of his songs today.
Andrii did not come to music young: the first songs were born in his fifty-first year — at the point when the heart already had something to say. And it turned out that songs “flower in the heart like flowers” — you only have to open your eyes and look inside yourself.
Behind each of his songs there is no wish to please, but a wish to reach a person. To comfort someone who is struggling. To remind someone worn out that he is still alive. To say to those closest what everyday words never quite hold. If even one song touches somebody's heart — then it wasn't written for nothing. Because behind all his songs stands a conviction he repeats again and again: “we are all one”.
These songs are about the Feeling of Life: about home and the road, about family and faithfulness, about the faith that holds even in silence, about love for one's native land and the quiet wonder of everyday things. There is the joy of spring and the sadness of autumn colours, lullabies for grandchildren and prayers for the homeland, words of thanks and words of hope. And in the songs of the war years there rings a belief in the unbreakable spirit of a people — the people who are “the root of the world… stubborn courage”. Everything, in short, that a human life is actually made of.
The thread running through it all is simple: life is a gift worth filling with meaning and with good, and then passing on — to children, to grandchildren, to anyone who will hear. Because “the light stays on in words and in songs”.
May these songs be a drop of warmth for you. Listen, share, live.