Behold The Lamb

Around 2017 Yemi kept hearing the same instruction — come away with me — at a point when his schedule made it inconvenient. He went reluctantly, booking two nights at a prayer house.

What he describes next he describes carefully, because he cannot explain it. On reaching his room he was overtaken by a weight of sleep he fought and lost, and while asleep he remained entirely conscious. He became certain someone else was in the room. He could not see them, and he says the room came alive with a purity of atmosphere he has no words for. He tried to force his eyes open and could not.

He woke, searched the room, found nobody, and prayed for a long time. What he took from it was not a message but a wish: to see the Lord face to face.

A few weeks later he began reading Revelation 5, and the chapter that had been ordinary became the song. Composition began on 15 February 2018. It took three years to arrive.

I confess that I am most inexperienced with classical music. I just believed the Lord wanted it so and I just followed through.Asked why classical

The strangest decision on the record is the one he explains least. Asked why a worship singer with no classical background would make an orchestral, cinematic record, he does not offer a musical reason. His argument for the genre, when he makes one, is not about taste but provision — that classical music is a gift already given to people, mistakenly filed as expensive and theatrical, and that the music described in Revelation is a symphony rather than a solo.

Believing the thing should exist and being able to play it are different problems, and the second one was solved by Tai Fraction, who played the violin and the orchestra. The surrounding me like a symphony line is not a metaphor about the arrangement. It is a description of it.

The lyric is Revelation 5 seen rather than summarised — the throne, the voice of many angels, the Lion who is also the Lamb, the ransom. But the thing to watch is the refrain, because it does not repeat. It changes four times, and in order.

It opens as a command: Behold The Lamb. Look. Then it becomes a report — I see the Lamb. Then a response: Glory to the Lamb. And then, finally, it stops describing him and turns to face him: You are the Lamb.

All I recalled was a white robed person in the room. I was not granted a facial view.On the retreat

Command, sight, praise, address. The song travels from talking about someone to talking to them, and it takes the whole record to do it. Set against the retreat that produced it — a presence he was certain of and was not granted a facial view of — the architecture is doing something the encounter would not. He could not see. The song moves, deliberately and across seven minutes, from being told to look, to seeing, to speaking directly.

One smaller change runs alongside it. The first chorus is the captain of my soul. The second is the captain of your soul. The ransom stays his; the captaincy is handed over.

It reached number one on the A Step FWD Official UK Chart for Contemporary Worship. It is also the reason Chains Fall exists: the hook Yemi went looking for on a winter morning was meant for this song, and refused to belong to it.