Hope Alive

Five months after releasing a seven-minute orchestral record, Yemi put out a two-minute-fifty dance track. The distance between them is the whole point of this catalogue, and Hope Alive is the clearest example of it: same subject, opposite room.

It was written for a specific person — a friend who, in his words, had seemingly lost everything — and out of a wider question about what hope is supposed to mean when a situation offers no evidence for it.

The timing is not incidental. It arrived in the summer of 2021, and he is direct about the doubt the preceding eighteen months had produced in people he knew.

In every lifeless situation that I have faced, one thing seems to be common: God almost always comes through.Yemi Alafifuni

The obvious response to that would have been a lament. He made a summer anthem instead, with Ian Copeland Green producing, and put the argument in the tempo rather than the lyric: not a song about waiting for hope, a song you cannot easily sit still through.

There is one more thing the lyric does, and it is easy to miss because of how cheerful the record is. The song never says I. From the wall to the floor, you just can’t take no more — it is addressed to somebody else from the first line to the last. The only first person in it is plural: as we wait, we believe it, we receive it. Written for one person who had lost almost everything, it never once turns to talk about the writer.

God has never failed us and He won’t start now. He is working, and His every word is yes and amen.From the release note — 2 Corinthians 1:20

The bridge is where it plants its feet. If God said it, he will do it, we believe it, that settles it — which is Numbers 23:19 compressed to nine words, and then repeated until it stops sounding like an argument and starts sounding like a decision. Taste and see the Lord is great is Psalm 34:8; eyes will see, ears will hear is Isaiah 35.

It went to number one on the A Step FWD Official UK Chart in September 2021, and fourteenth on iTunes Finland — an unremarkable fact that becomes interesting when you notice how much of his listening happens in places he has never played.