'I Love You' by Billie Eilish as the Soundtrack of My Debut Work ("Blackbird Whisper")

All movies have soundtracks. Some end up more recognizable than others; some even find the capacity to overshadow the entire story, the cast, and the plot itself. Some become their own movies, their own independent emotions.

The power of music is something beyond dispute, disagreement, or debate. It has the strength to amplify whatever emotion one is harboring. Melancholic music reinforces a depressive, sorrowful state, while on the opposite spectrum, joyous or motivational tracks make it difficult to sit quietly, sending a rhythmic beat to your limbs that forces your body into dynamic motion.

If we step away from long visual mediums and focus on shorter video formats, social media content relies on music as a vital anchor. It is a tool that doesn’t merely support a message, but actively sustains the atmosphere of the story being told.

Visceral. I think that’s the right word here.

It goes both ways: it manifests itself in a visceral reaction where the body feels an emotion before the mind can catch up with a gut-level grasp. It also molds into a visceral message when an artist steps away from the glamour, the artificiality, and the trend-chasing, entering instead into their deepest, most authentic, honest, and raw self.

What comes from the heart reaches the heart. What comes from the soul reaches the soul. That is a belief by which I firmly stand. It might not happen at that exact split second; it is entirely possible that a message cast out into the world will only reach its true addressee in a couple of months, years, or even decades. Not immediately. Not soon. But as long as it eventually arrives, the wait is worth it. That is another conviction that has imposed itself upon me the more living I have done, and the more exposure to life I have experienced.

It seems to be the case that the more you live, the more your initial belief systems get either metamorphosed or completely crushed, but that is simply what happens to many precious things in life.

Summer 2019. I discovered this song in the summer of 2019, just a couple of months after its release date. I didn’t know the artist at the time; all I knew was that the melody touched me in ways I could never imagine, could never fully comprehend. I could easily weep while listening to it. I would take naps, drifting off to sleep under its weight. It wasn't about the lyrics, nor the composition, nor what it explicitly represented. Honestly, I am unable to fully articulate the precise reason why it resonated so deeply. But does it really matter? Does it matter now, when for the last eight years this single song, written by a soul completely unrelated to me, has carried the weight of the story I’ve been writing for almost a decade?

Sometimes, I think of Blackbird Whisper as a serpent that keeps shedding its skin as the seasons shift.

The core idea for the novel came to me in April 2019, a time when I was still my most excited, unburdened self. If I am miscalculating past timeframes in my reminiscence, then at most it was as early as March 2019, no sooner. One of my university friends and I sat at the campus fast-food court with our laptops, lunches, and coffees. At some point, our conversation turned into a request for advice, opinions, and raw feedback. I had this thin orange notebook where I would jot down story concepts to see whether, as time progressed, I would still care about them or forget them altogether. About one particular concept, I was so viscerally excited that I couldn't clear it from my thoughts. So I told my friend:

“Listen. I have an idea for a story. Just tell me how it sounds to you and whether you think it works.”

“Go on,” she said, giving me the space to speak.

“There is a middle-aged man who is hired by the mafia to kill a young boy, because the man owes them a debt, and the mafia doesn't want to dirty their own hands with this target's blood. But the older man doesn't want to kill this boy, or anyone else, for that matter. So, an idea comes to him: if he cannot kill the boy himself, he can manipulate the boy into taking his own life. The entire story revolves around an old man trying to break a young boy's mind, because his own hands refuse to pull the trigger.”

I don’t remember whether it was my friend who first noticed it, or if simply speaking the words aloud to another human being made me finally see it, but one structural decision was locked in after that meeting: the mafia subplot was completely unnecessary. It made the concept feel childish, slightly comedic, and shallow.

Having stripped away the mafia element, a massive gap appeared in the plot, and a critical question arose: “If not the mafia, then what or who makes this old man think he absolutely needs to destroy this young boy?”

Then May arrived. I turned nineteen. And then summer came, and with it, the depression that had first crept in back in the autumn of 2018 and the winter of 2019 returned in its third wave. This time, it hit with more intensity, and far less mercy.

Losing control over your own mind felt insane. Powerless. Terrifying. Completely isolating, where the crowd surrounding you makes absolutely no difference, and couldn’t have helped even if they wanted to. Losing control, in general, is excruciatingly exhausting. You lose your equilibrium. You lose your balance. You lose all understanding of what is happening, what happened, and what will come next.

As the seasons shifted and autumn arrived, things began to lift, at least, that was how I perceived it. I welcomed October 2019 with a clearer, more insightful, and refreshed mental state. And the question that had been haunting me since April finally found its answer. Now, I knew exactly what force replaced the mafia. I knew who made the old man believe he had to kill the boy.

Both the story and its soundtrack were forged in the absolute darkest season of my life. And then, of course, came the title. The narrative wasn't about pressure, or overt coercion, or asking someone to perform an action. It was about a whisper. I began searching for the most symbolic whisper that could exist.

“A bird would work. They sing, which can be the natural equivalent of whispering,” I reasoned.

I needed the bird to represent death, but I didn't want it to signify a purely physical or material demise; I meant to keep it metaphysical. Furthermore, I didn't want the bird to be a simple, ominous bad omen. It needed to imply protection and a form of guidance, rather than absolute, cold annihilation. Therefore, ravens, crows, owls, and vultures were out of the question. They didn't fit the message.

Hence, the title was chosen: “Шепот черного дрозда,” which translates from Russian as “Blackbird Whisper.”

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