Gil Scott-Heron’s “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” is entirely built on despair around inversion: home as the trap, the address where addiction and self-loathing wait for a man no matter how far he runs from them.

The Nigerian singer Deziire (real name: Desire Chisom Diribe) flips the idea of home as a trap entirely on his song “Make It Home,” portraying the road as a place where danger dwells and “evil eyes wishing him harm”. Spending most of the song on his knees, literally and by his own admission, home is where he’s straining to reach through all of his troubles.

The song is a confession of a listless man suffering from insomnia because guilt and shadow are pressing on his mind. From that confession, the track builds into a prayer about seeking inner peace. The roads, however, keep tormenting him physically and mentally.

Deziire’s voice bears the struggles of that structure of his desire to make it home hale and hearty. He sings calmly, almost eerily so. But the calmness is pretentious; it’s a pleading dressed up to sound steady. The performative peacefulness is to keep panic out of his voice, which is the harder trick and the more interesting one.

When he transitions into pidgin midway through, asking for protection from a God he keeps thanking for the distance he’s already travelled, the change in register gives a heightened mood. English holds the private anxiety, pidgin holds the communal plea, and the song moves between the two, showing the anxiety of a man calculating the number of steps he would take to get to his fortress.

Without attempting to interrupt his singing, the instrumental stays out of his way almost entirely. It’s a relaxed arrangement, layered loosely, with a skittering synth drum pattern that never resolves into a conventional groove. The restlessness beneath the laid-back vocal suits the song’s subject about a man trying to stay still while everything around him seems to scatter. The siren and undertaker imagery bring danger into view without ever showing it directly. The song’s album art explicitly depicts the violence.

The song, despite its calm structure and inspiring lyrics, loses some of its nerve in repetition. The chorus keeps returning to the same plea for arrival and guiding light, God and home without letting that plea grow across the runtime. The song is more invested in spiritual bargaining, measuring gratitude against fear line by line. It doesn’t explore the concept as it should, flippantly engaging where it should be thorough. By the third pass through the hook, the prayer starts to sound recited instead of being heartfelt, and that undercuts the vulnerability of the verses.

The song’s hook flatly handles the tension. Deziire mentions real stakes early: “people wishing him ill”, “a life that has him in what he calls a chokehold”, and then resolves all of it through faith alone, repeatedly, without letting the doubt win a single round.

Even one verse where the prayer falters, where the guiding light gets harder to find, would have made the ending more deserving and impressive. As it stands, the song states its faith instead of testing it. Deziire’s calm expression of it makes us feel what it costs to hold onto it.

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark,” the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire writes in her poem, Home, sharing Gil Scott-Heron’s belief about displacement. Where Scott-Heron’s and Shire’s narrators find hatred waiting behind their doors, Deziire, on the other hand, implies that home is where the heart is, when the roads become violent and bloodthirsty. He treats the door as salvation, a place of protection worth crawling toward on his knees if that’s what it takes.

“Make It Home” works because Deziire handles calm as a vocal choice even where the writing wants a bigger arc. He never oversells the fear, never oversells the relief.