DNA

At his first university Yemi fell in with a group of Christian students who greeted each other with the same line every time. Not hello. You carry God on your inside. It was meant as a reminder of who they were, and it stayed with him for about twenty years before he did anything with it.

What he eventually did with it was take it literally. Manufacturers sign their work; a maker leaves a mark that says whose it is. If the same is true here, where is the signature? The song's answer is in the title, and it is not a metaphor he is reaching for — it is the claim that the mark is in the material.

He wrote it on a flight. The result is the only afrobeat record in the catalogue and the shortest thing on this site, at two minutes thirty-six.

You carry God on your inside.How his university fellowship greeted each other

The argument runs through Isaiah 64:8 — the potter and the clay, all of us the work of one hand — and lands somewhere more open than most worship records go. He is explicit that the trace he is describing is not restricted to people who agree with him.

The chorus is where the argument actually gets made, and the verse behind it is better chosen than any of the ones he names. In Him I live and move and have my being is Acts 17:28 — Paul in Athens, standing in front of people who did not worship his God, telling them they already lived and moved and had their being in him and quoting one of their own poets back at them to prove it. It is the one place in scripture where the claim is put to outsiders, and it is exactly the claim this song makes.

The presence of God is not a lofty abstract. It exists in the same way that our breathing, heartbeat and bone marrow do. You can’t get away from it, and you can’t shake it.Yemi Alafifuni

The grammar then performs the widening. Verse one is mine: every breath I take, something in my DNA, in Him I live. Verse two is ours: somewhere in your story, there’s Yahweh in our DNA, in Him we live and move and have our being. It starts with him and ends with everyone, which is the shortest possible summary of what he says the song is for.

We all have a trace of God in us. That’s in everyone — Christian or not, black or white and every colour or race in between.On who the song is about

The outro drops the theology and just states it twice: you can’t hide Him, you can’t shake Him, there’s G.O.D. in our bones. Spelled out, letter by letter, the way you would spell a word into a strand.

It arrived alongside a stack of research into identity, and it is the closest he has come to writing a song for people outside the room. Released 2 February 2024, four weeks to the day before Deep, both of them announced as part of a body of work called The Prodigals.