Prodigal Father

Prodigal Father closes the album and is the longest thing on it. The title reads like a slip — the prodigal in the parable is the son — and it is not one.

Prodigal does not mean wayward. It means recklessly extravagant, wasteful, spending without counting. The son earned the word by squandering an inheritance. The hook hands it to the other man in the story: your love keeps giving giving, like a prodigal — endlessly giving giving, like a prodigal Father.

Which is arguably what the parable was always about. The son is careless with money. The father is careless with dignity: he sees his boy at a distance and runs, and men of his standing did not run. The song takes the most famous word in the story away from the person who wasted a fortune and gives it to the one who wasted his pride.

The chorus calls him Abba, which is Romans 8:15 — the verse about adoption, where the Spirit given is the one that lets a person use that word at all. It is the third song here built out of Romans 8, after Son and Chains Fall.

The pre-chorus does something else. You are the God that I see in the mirror; when I fall short, I find my identity in You. A mirror is what 2 Corinthians 3:18 actually says — beholding as in a glass — and seven years later Face to Face would take the rest of that verse and build a single on it. The mirror is here first.

And the verb is here too. Testify, how You father me. Great Titles has I love the way you Father me; Through has Father me with a smile. Three songs on one album where fathering is something performed rather than a title held.

One last thing this song did. Between 2023 and 2024 Yemi announced three singles — Found, Home and DNA — as part of a body of work called The Prodigals. That record never appeared. Its name came from here: the closing track of the debut was going to be the first word of the follow-up.