The Sound: 

WONTEN’s music is a true cultural merge between his Liberian roots and his Iowan upbringing. Built between contemporary American songwriting and retro Afro foundation, it’s warm, yearning soul is cooled and given a resilient spine by African rhythms. This is not just a fusion of sounds, but of worlds.

 

The Story: 

Born in the chaos of the Liberian civil war, WONTEN found his voice in the silence that followed. Separated from his parents as a child, his sanctuary was the sound of an e-piano. That search for a room of one’s own shaped his art, forged in a Cedar Rapids apartment through a creative tug-of-war with his brother, a church drummer. His music is architecture: each song is a blueprint for a sanctuary, most powerfully in his debut single, “if Heaven was a place,” a track built as a sonic response to his mother’s illness.