By Emmanuel Waziri Okoro

Yemi Pelda’s 14-minute medley, “Grateful Heart,” is a continuous celebration made for both church setting and personal devotion. Leading the Pelda Band, the gospel artist stitches ten popular worship songs into a single high-energy African praise experience. But the twist is, there are no new compositions. Pelda relies on popular gospel anthems, using rhythm and arrangement to bind them together.

The strength of “Grateful Heart” is in its arrangement and cadence. To keep a 14-minute live performance from feeling like a disjointed mix of song, Pelda puts the entire track to a rich Nigerian rhythm. Instead of letting songs end or pause between transitions, Yemi Pelda and his band maintain a uniform, high-BPM pulse. Slow, introspective ballads lose their traditional solemnity and are remade over charged percussion, transforming devotion songs into a danceable, communal experience.

The medley opens by bridging indigenous worship and global praise. It starts with the famous Nigerian gospel song “Olorun To Da Awon,” setting a tone of communal reverence.  Then it goes into Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up.” Mike Abdul’s “Korede” injects local pulse before JJ Hairston and Youthful Praise’s “You Deserve It,” and Nathaniel Bassey’s “You Are Mighty” ties global gospel back to local worship.

The tempo doesn’t drop for the transition; if anything it tightens, and the backup singers thicken the harmony right where the pace would otherwise feel like whiplash.

The second half shifts from collective declaration to personal thanksgiving. Omotoso Oluwafemi’s “Mo Mo Riri Re” comes in before Nathaniel Bassey’s “See What The Lord Has Done,” and CeCe Winans’ “Goodness Of God.” Sinach’s “Awesome God” brings the music to an end.

Their approach directly reflects the dynamic of a Sunday service or a praise party of a youth or energetic church. In modern Nigerian worship culture, the worship leader’s main job isn’t to introduce unfamiliar music, but to guide an audience through shared musical landmarks. Pelda excels in this lead role. By weaving together local church standards and international worship hits, the medley relies on collective memory. The theme of gratitude is expressed through a meditation that requires a relentless physical stamina.

However, this format creates a ceiling for Pelda as a singer. Because he operates within the safe boundaries of well-known gospel hits, his voice becomes less adventurous. He delivers clear, steady vocals with solid stamina, but he rarely pushes his range, attempts complex improvisations, or reinterprets familiar melodies in unexpected ways. His main focus remains on keeping the room moving, which leaves little space for risk-taking, vocal or technique wise.

From a production standpoint, the live instrumentation makes it an enjoyable listening experience. It’s crisp and moving. “Grateful Heart” succeeds because it plays its purpose, which is to take known songs people already love and package them into an uplifting workout of praise. If anything, this is practical gospel music.

However, conclusively, at the bottom of this enjoyable medley is a rights conversation. This medley is curated almost entirely from other people’s copyrighted work, performed and distributed the way gospel medleys typically are, with a leniency commercial music rarely gets. That brings a concern and a question that beseeches more than the music. Yes, the music might be great, but in cases like this in the gospel music scene, once artists have else’s melody, what to do with it? Should the answer be a resolve from repeatedly bending towards personal rhythmic signature, as ms instead preserve the original?