Father to the fatherless

He grew up in Nigeria in a broken home, with the identity struggles and low self-esteem that tend to come with it. What he found instead of a way round it was what he calls active faith — “the force of God behind any exploit.”

His first gospel music was Maranatha! Music and the Kids Praise records. He had no conservatory place, no vocal coach and no money for either. What he had was a boarding school behind his house. Every other night a group of girls there gathered to sing worship songs, and their voices carried across the swamp that separated the school from his home and into his room, and kept him awake. So he started singing along with them, night after night, and waiting for the next one.

At fourteen he was made Head Usher of his school’s Christian Fellowship and started teaching worship songs to the others. It was the first time anyone put him in front of a room. He won a number of local gospel soloist competitions in those years, which he mentions rarely and has never made anything of. He later led worship and the choir at Church of His Presence in the UK. Choir, repetition, and a great many nights spent listening is the whole of his training.

There was a boy in his class at school who used to stand at the front and preach. The other children spat at him for it. He kept doing it, several times over, and then one day he stood there and wept. Weeks later, walking home, Yemi called on Jesus and gave him his heart.

He describes that day as the happiest of his life — “delirious happiness,” he wrote, and a lightness that felt like flight. For a long time afterwards he sat outside his parents’ house in the evenings and talked to God. Not prayers exactly. He says he told God his wild expectations and laughed out loud at them, made jokes, and wondered whether God found them funny.

Years before this page existed he wrote an essay about loneliness, and ended it on a line he took from the psalms: that God plants the lonely in a family. It sits one verse below the line at the top of this page. Psalm 68 says God is a father to the fatherless, and then immediately says he sets the lonely in families. He has been writing out of those two sentences for twenty years, which is most of what there is to say about the catalogue.

The theme holds still while everything around it moves. Behold The Lamb, from February 2021, is orchestral and cinematic, written out of a 2017 encounter and Revelation 5. Chains Fall, produced by Ernest Vaughan and mastered by Herb Powers Jr., is gospel, recorded at All Nations Worship Assembly in Chicago during lockdown. Home is Christmas pop, and the only thing in the catalogue mixed in Dolby Atmos. Our Father and Hope Alive are Christian EDM.

Noel Robinson guests on the debut. Jake Isaac produced Found. Ian Copeland Green produced HERE, Deep, DNA and the YHWH EP. Evans Ogboi produced the Father album. None of it was made for a label, because there has never been one.

The range is not versatility for its own sake. Asked why a worship singer with no classical training would make an orchestral record, he gave the least strategic answer available:

Multiple Grammy considerations in four categories, including Best New Artist, and a voting member of the Recording Academy since 2021. Number one on the A Step FWD Official UK Chart. Number one on iTunes UK Christian & Gospel on 10 November 2020 with Chains Fall. Hope Alive reached number one on A Step FWD in September 2021 and fourteenth on iTunes Finland.

Sold-out rooms in Malmö, Essex and New York in 2019. One Night with The Father at Canterbury Cathedral Lodge on 29 March 2025. National press in Vanguard in March 2021. The first record went out on 4 April 2015 — a decade of releases since, and not one of them behind a label.

Two decades of writing and a decade of releasing with nobody behind him left him with a fairly exact idea of what independent artists in this genre go without. Rather than complain about it he built it. He is the founder of Mazmory, a platform for Christian and gospel artists that carries a release from distribution through to pitching, booking and the numbers that come back — the things a label would otherwise do, or otherwise not do.

He is also the founder of Wear Your Heart, a Christian streetwear line, made to order — the same conviction as the music, in a form you can put on.

There is also a children’s book, Living Hope: Cakuva and The Crown, written with his wife Bunmi — two children walk into a city ruined by the greed of the people running it. Which is recognisably the same preoccupation as the records, handed to an audience young enough to need it in pictures.

None of it is a sideline to the singing. It is what the singing required. The clearest thing anyone can say about whether the platform works is that his own shows are booked on it.

Every song on this site can be downloaded and kept, for nothing. No email address, no account, no card. That is not a promotion and there is no plan for it to end. Songs about a father who gives without asking for anything first are difficult to sell honestly, and he stopped trying some time ago.

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