“I lose hope,” the opening verse of “Hope In You” admits, “but I keep it to myself / ’Cause no one cares what you go through.” It is the kind of confession Kirk Franklin has built a career on, and the chorus answers it with the plainest line on the record. Then, a little past the one-minute mark, the song changes accent.
Davido opens his verse by praying that he will not “enter one chance,” the Nigerian city nightmare of climbing into a bus whose driver and passengers are in on robbing you.
From there he goes straight into “Hallelujah meje meje,” the sevenfold hallelujah any Yoruba congregation would recognise, and “Oluwa ti gbe mi leke,” God has lifted me up. He sings that he just wants to “kore dele,” to bring good things home, and closes on “Make my people jere mi,” a wish that the people around him benefit from him. The opening verse keeps its doubt to itself, and Davido’s verse says its prayer out loud, in the Pidgin and Yoruba of a Lagos service.
“Hope In You” is the third track on I Am What I Am, the double album Franklin put out this morning, with seven studio songs and seven live ones. Davido shares the guest list with GloRilla, Jelly Roll and Tobe Nwigwe. The credits name David Adeleke as a co-writer alongside Franklin and Oladeinde Okubajo, and Maxwell Stark and Daniel Bryant produced it with Franklin. The song first surfaced at Franklin’s listening session in Atlanta on October 12, where, according to reports from the room, Davido performed his verse and then joined the choir. Two days ago Voice of Nigeria and DancehallMag were still describing the record from that one evening.
Davido has walked towards a choir before. The NATIVE’s essay on gospel in Afropop lists his “Bless Me,” from 2012’s Omo Baba Olowo: The Genesis, among the faith songs his generation “respected” without carrying them “past their debut albums.” He came back to it in May 2022 with “Stand Strong,” backed by Kanye West’s Sunday Service Choir. The NATIVE’s review of Timeless heard “less Asake and more black gospel choir” in it, and noted that the single “didn’t catch on as Davido’s camp would have hoped.”
This time the choir belongs to the host. Four years after borrowing Kanye’s singers, Davido is a guest on the album of the gospel star Kanye himself brought in for “Ultralight Beam.”
The song stays close to the church floor. The chorus turns “Oh my, oh my, oh my, hope is in You” over and over, and past the two-minute mark a voice calls “Everybody sing” before the bridge asks, “Your people hurting, Your people dying / Can you hear us crying?” Nothing in it asks more of the listener than to join in.
That bridge asks heaven to “open up” and “shower down Your blessings.” Davido had already asked for something smaller and more specific. He wants to get home with good things, and he does not want to end up in the wrong bus.
“Hope In You” is out now. Listen on Apple Music.