Great Titles

Great Titles was written on a train between Paris and London, while Yemi was trying to decide what to call God — not in the abstract, but specifically: which title was owed for what he had actually been.

Most of the song is the answer to that question in list form, and the list is a conventional one. Healer. Banner. Hiding place. Fortress, strong tower, provider, way maker. Alpha and Omega, the Lord of Hosts, our peace. God who sees me, God who hears me. Any worship record could carry those.

Then there is the line that no worship record carries, sitting at the end of the first verse: they call you Yahweh, but I call you Daddy. The whole song is a formal inventory of titles that exists in order to reject all of them in favour of one informal word.

Verse two turns it around and finds the reciprocal, which is better than the joke it could have been: we call you great names, you call us by our names.

God has revealed himself in many ways to everyone. One way to acknowledge that experience is to call him names tantamount to your experience, your worship. For me, I call him daddy.Yemi Alafifuni

Seven years later he released YHWH — an entire song about the name Yahweh, written after a comedian made him realise he could not say what it was. It contains both halves of this line, separately: I love to call your name, Yahweh Asher Yahweh, and I love to call you Daddy. Both songs land on the same verse, Exodus 3:14, and neither settles the question in favour of the formal option.

Great Titles asks it first, and then hands it over. Yemi’s note about the song ends on a question rather than a claim.

What do you call Him?How he ends the note

It was the first single from Father, features Noel Robinson, and is the one track on the album Jonathan MacMillan mixed rather than Randy Poole.