Some stories are so deep they call out to be sung. On his new single “SWEET VALENTINE” Leepeck transmutes a chapter of his family’s past into an ethereally captivating piece of music, one that intertwines his grief with universal themes of love, loss, and remembrance.
The song was inspired by events that took place in Lviv in the 1920s and 1930s, when Leepeck’s great-grandparents, Paweł and Walentyna, became entangled in a heartbreaking narrative. Paweł, an oil rig worker frequently away on contracts in South America, returned home to find Walentyna had been unfaithful to him. What ensued was a desperate act from which there was no turning back. In a haze of heartbreak, Paweł took her life before killing himself. Left behind were seven children, including Leepeck’s grandfather, Piotr, who, at 15, became the impossible caretaker, supporting his brothers and sisters until, with war, they were scattered around the world.
It’s this darkly dramatic past that “SWEET VALENTINE” leaps from. Instead of indulging in melodrama, Leepeck delivers a song that’s tender, reflective, and deeply human. His voice lends the storytelling heft here, allowing listeners enough space to fill in their emotions with the music. There’s an openness here, a feeling that he is not just retelling a family secret but bringing us into the shared fragility of a love and the painful aftermath of losing it. “SWEET VALENTINE” lights with musical restraint. Leepeck’s delivery is simultaneously intimate and panoramic, inviting storytelling to unfold like a distant but never-quite-out-of-reach memory. It’s not a rewriting of history so much as an invocation of its emotional afterlife, the dull ache of a love betrayed, the tragedy of decisions forged in desperation, the ghostly legacy of that which leaves behind.
In choosing to sanctify this chapter of his lineage in song, Leepeck reminds us that music is more than melody and rhythm, it is an inheritance, a means of conveying stories that might otherwise gently fade away. “SWEET VALENTINE” is not a sensationalistic reading of the past, it dignifies it, respects the people who lived through it, and processes personal loss into art that’s universally felt.