Padre

Padre is the oldest song Yemi has released, and for most of its life it existed only in his own hands. The idea arrived around the year 2000, at a rehearsal with one purpose: to present something good enough to be taken on as staff at his local church. He needed the job. He did not have the resources to produce the song properly, so he set it aside — but not away. He kept it close, rehearsed it often, and rewrote pieces of it every time he came back to it.

He sang it in church that following Sunday. He got the job.

Then he turned it down. He could not shake the sense that he was selling a gift he had been given rather than earned — that his motives were wrong. And when he prayed about it, nothing came back. His account of the decision is not a triumphant one: his Father was quiet, he heard nothing either way about the job, and letting it go was painful.

Make no mistakes, I love my dad. He brought out the very best in me.On the relationship the song is about

The friend who had arranged the job could not believe he was passing on something lucrative, and gave him a nickname for it. Local champion — the conclusion being that he was too frightened to leave a church where he was already celebrated.

Twenty-three years later, releasing Found, Yemi said in public that worship is not among the things for sale and that salvation cannot be sold because it is already paid for. Every recording on this site is now free for the same reason. The refusal came first, long before there was a policy to hang it on, and it cost him a job he needed.

He simply fathered me Himself.On finding God as Father

The song itself stayed unreleased for close to twenty years.

I really couldn’t shake off the thought that I was selling my God-given gift. My motives were wrong, and my Father was quiet.On turning down the job the song won him

What eventually made sense of it was not a better arrangement. In January 2018 he set out to make a record about God as Father, aimed squarely at what he calls the fatherless generation, and the shelved song turned out to be the reason the album existed. Padre — Father — opens it.

The story underneath is his own, and he has been careful about how he tells it. Until he was five he had what he describes as an enviable, loving relationship with his own father. That changed when his father remarried. He did not lose him to distance or death: his father was still there, and was no longer there for him. He and his older brother were inadequately cared for, and he had little contact with his mother from a young age. What he learned in those years, by his own account, was survival, a hard skin, and a low estimate of himself that took much longer to undo than to acquire.

Many know God as a miracle worker. A far dynasty that feels unreachable. But this is incorrect. God is closer than we realize.On what the album is arguing against

He does not write his father as a villain, and the song is not an accusation. It is about the substitution that followed — finding God as Father rather than as an authority to be managed or a miracle worker to be petitioned.

That is the whole argument of the record, and Padre states it first: not a distant power who occasionally intervenes, but someone who did the actual work of fathering him. Everything in the catalogue since — Prodigal Father, Found, Home, Deep, DNA, Our Father — is a further verse of the same claim.