Who is WONTEN?

I. THE EXILE

 

WONTEN's world cracked open when he was five. The last thing he saw from the back seat of the car was his mother crying on the ground in Monrovia, his father’s arms failing to hold her up.

 

Then: dust. Thick, red dust that coated a boy’s black shoes brown by the end of the road. A three-bedroom house in Nimba County with seventeen other children, some orphans, some war-struck, all strangers. A symphony of survival: the smell of car exhaust, the sweet smoke of roasting corn, the constant, shouted poetry of street vendors. His only anchor was a sound: the soft, round tone of an e-piano his mother sent. The highs weren’t too high. The lows weren’t too low. In that noisy, crowded world, it was the one room with a lock on the inside.

 

II. THE ALCHEMY

 

Growing up in an African home, there wasn’t much room for a boy to speak his mind. Music became the only door out of that silence. A soundtrack searching for its scene. Now, he builds rooms with sound. He starts in a space no bigger than a drawer top in his brother’s bedroom. They stayed in a Cedar Rapids apartment, just off a college campus. The equipment was a keyboard, speakers, mic, and a laptop they had to cool in the fridge every few hours so it wouldn’t catch fire. The air was thick with heat and argument.

 

He wanted sentiment, melody, the oceanic pull of the choir music in his bones. His brother, a church drummer, wanted the complex, grounding rhythms of home. It was a tug-of-war for years. The compromise is the sound: warm, yearning soul melodies, cooled and given a spine by resilient African rhythms. It is a sanctuary built from creative friction. He takes the lead, but the floor his brother builds is what makes it stand.

 

III. THE SANCTUARY: “if Heaven was a place”

 

This is not a love song. It is a blueprint for a specific room where his mother is well.

 

It is built from three sounds:

 

1. Her prayer for her sons, recorded before a move.

2. The white noise hum of a car idling outside the hospital, where he sang the first take.

3. That same e-piano sound from his childhood, the safe place.

 

The song is inspired by a phone call. Driving to Chicago, he heard his mother cry over a diagnosis. It was his superhero, beaten. The lyrics are a stark proposition: “What shall it profit me to lose a jewelry like you?” It is the sound of trying to build a cure out of chord progressions, of trying to draft a heaven with a specific address: right next to her.

 

IV. THE MAN

 

Born within the chaos of the Liberian civil war, where the first lullabies were the sounds of guns. He was soon separated from his parents in early childhood, he turned to sound as his primary language, a means to express what words couldn't. 

 

The music never turns off. It’s the only thing that can silence the trauma and chaos. It plays in the back of his mind like a permanent radio. In a lifestyle, a culture, and a home that doesn’t show much expression, music has always been and always will be his favorite form of expression. It’s the one thing he’ll always have control of. It is when and how he chooses to tell his story, his safe space.