Dance for Love

Dance for Love is track two, and it opens with a child talking rather than anybody singing: ladies and gentlemen, the Father is in love with you, he sings over you.

That is Zephaniah 3:17, and putting it here does something specific. Every other song on this record is a person singing to a father. This one says the Father sings first — which, on an album by a singer, quietly hands the job to somebody else. The dancing in the title is not the offering. It is the response to hearing it.

The word that stops you in the verses is alibi. Your love is my alibi, twice. An alibi is not a gift or a comfort; it is evidence that you were not where the accusation places you. In a catalogue this preoccupied with not measuring up — Chains Fall is four verses on the same subject — it is an unusually legal way to describe being loved, and it is the more moving for being unsentimental.

The second verse settles the argument by pointing at the grave, and the hook gives up on argument altogether: oh love, amazing love, oh dance.

Then the song stops, and the same voice returns for the last word: three things remain — faith, hope and love — but the greatest is love.

The child is Yemi’s daughter, and she has both ends of the track — the announcement at the top and the last word at the bottom. The placement is not decorative. This is an album about what a father is for, made by a man who did not get one, and the song is bracketed at both ends by his own kid. He writes the fatherhood theme from both sides at once, and this is the first place he does it.