I am Proud of Where I Come From: A Conversation with KENTON

Queer Asian American singer-songwriter KENTON’s upcoming record, Sweetmouth, will simultaneously make you dance the night away while hitting you in the feels. With powerfully candid storytelling, sing-along choruses, expressive vocals, intriguing arrangements, and memorable hooks, Sweetmouth is sure to appeal to any fan of emotionally raw pop music.

OFM chats with KENTON about Sweetmouth.

Songwriting and Collaborating with Eric Cannata

“I think that my songwriting has always pushed more towards complex arrangements, complex harmonies, and wanting to tell a long narrative, and what’s really interesting about this album for me is that I had to basically extrapolate that across 15 tracks rather than try to tell a full story in one song,” says KENTON.

KENTON collaborated with his good friend Eric Cannata (Young The Giant) on Sweetmouth. Cannata produced the record and helped co-write some songs, including “Dirty Laundry.” “He loves saying this phrase ‘What’s the sticky? How do we make this sticky, so people actually remember what you’re doing?” recalls KENTON. “The album itself is so personal and digs up a lot of emotions that are quite unpleasant for me. There was a lot where I had to lean on his distance from the material for him to be like, ‘OK, cool. That was really dark. What should we do with that? How do we put that on paper and translate that into something people will actually connect to?”

Opening With a Welcome and Ending with a Mantra

Much of the album takes inspiration from a trip that KENTON took to Taiwan to visit his parents, the visit marking their first time seeing each other in nearly six years. The trip brought up many emotions and feelings for him. This is why he opens Sweetmouth with “I’m Breaking My Father’s Heart.”

“What I wanted to do was welcome you at the start of the album to my state of mind going into all of this,” shares KENTON. “I had spent my entire trip (in Taiwan) running away from these feelings and numbing them. I’m sure many people with complicated relationships with their parents can really relate to how we tend to numb ourselves and dissociate to get through some very, very big and hard emotions. I didn’t really get a chance to process all of that until I left … I really am breaking my father’s heart. It is heartbreaking and sad but also hopeful. If we can have and hold hope and love and can hold contrasting feelings within ourselves, there is so much opportunity for growth and change.”

KENTON ended Sweetmouth with “Let Light In” because he wanted to leave listeners with something he learned while making the album. “If you want to be present, and want to not have the patterns that have hindered you in your past to keep continuing over and over again, you really have to confront where you are, and the things you do,” he shares. “My very close friends that I grew up with, we like to do mantras at the beginning of every year. I presented them with this mantra: ‘Let light in.’ It’s so easy for us to see the darkness in the world, and there is a lot of darkness, but there is also a lot of hope and a lot of love. We have to confront all of it and accept all of it in order to live full lives.”

Honoring His Roots

KENTON wanted to honor the sounds he grew up with, as well as the sounds his father taught him and grew up with. One way KENTON does this is by prominently featuring the erhu, an instrument his father played. Additionally, the chorus of “Vaporize Me” has a specific melody inspired by a Hakka folk song his father used to sing. When he first started as a musician, KENTON was not interested in utilizing these things.

“I would really shy away from it to the point where I didn’t even understand why I was doing it, and would just tell people it’s a gimmick,” he comments. “I’m realizing it’s not a gimmick because it is my culture, my past, the sounds of my parents, the sounds that I grew up with, and has influenced the way I write, the way I think, and the way I approach the world in my songwriting.

My mother used to say she could hear a lot of Chinese influence in my songs, and I would be mad about it. Now I realize I was ashamed and embarrassed. I felt like if I emphasized my Asian roots that I was then somehow less American, and that just isn’t the case. I am proud of where I come from. I am proud of the experience that I have had as an Asian American. I’ve also come to the realization that if not for people like me and if not for the people I’m going to and asking them to play these instruments, what happens to them? It doesn’t continue, and then all that culture and history is lost, and the sounds are gone.”

Expressing Vulnerable and Personal Feelings

KENTON shares that previously he was “afraid to be personal in things,” so with Sweetmouth, he is “letting it all out.” In the album version of “Dirty Laundry,” there is an extended outro in which KENTON expresses some very personal stuff. “Eric and I had such a good groove going (at the end), we didn’t want to stop it, and we just had so much fun putting it all together, so I took a shot of whiskey, and went for it,” recalls KENTON. “We didn’t do many takes because I was like, ‘I can’t keep drinking.’ I was just going off like, ‘blah blah blah blah Mom.’ I’m like ‘Oops! Here I am trying to be secretive about stuff, and I just blurted it out.’”

What event in particular made him blurt these things out? “About 10 or 12 years ago, I was close friends with a woman who performed in a burlesque show,” he continues. “She asked me to sing for one of the numbers, and she danced around me. Being a pastor’s kid, I was like, ‘This sounds fun and risqué.’ Her boyfriend had taken a video, posted it on YouTube, and put me in the description. There were maybe five views on the video. One of them was my mother. She had been searching the internet for videos of me and found it. She took me to a Denny’s when she came to visit and was having a full-on meltdown trying to grab my hands and be like, ‘Please don’t do this.’

We are just expressing ourselves. Yes, it is at a bar, and yes, there is alcohol. Nobody is being dangerous. You just don’t like it because you think that it is so shameful. It’s a double standard when I have actually been quite drama-free, even though I am in the entertainment industry, and our family has had quite its share of drama. I am not one of them, yet I am the thing that you are most afraid of and embarrassed about because I refuse to keep myself hidden.”

“3 AM In Taipei” was inspired by a voice memo KENTON took when he was in Taipei and sees him wondering what his life would be like if he lived in Taiwan, where both of his parents are from. “I was leaving a club not sober and realized it was three and the metro was closed, and I was like ‘Where is my motel’ and I think it was a mile away, and so I had to do this walk,” he shares. “Through this walk, I had a lot of time to think about my life. I forget what time it would’ve been in L.A., but I was thinking, I don’t want to be by myself right now, so I was calling all my friends. They were all busy because they had full-time jobs or stuff like that.

It’s this question I have, which is also why I sing in Mandarin: Was the sacrifice worth it? When so many of our parents make these big sacrifices, uproot their lives to have a better life, whether it’s across the states a different country, whether its across town for a job, you always have this question, you always think that, like, as a kid, “I wish we would be there. Why did we have to leave?” At this point it doesn’t matter. This is who I am. This is where we are. I love my life … But I really wanted to explore that thought of looking around this room with all these people that look like me, which does not happen here, would I have felt more seen, and would that have made me happy?”

Creating Pop Bangers, Soft Ballads, and an Anthemic Rock Tune

The vulnerably melancholic lyrical content of “Gift Of Loneliness” is a perfect match with the groovy and soaring instrumentation. KENTON drew inspiration from “Pumped Up Kicks,” particularly how its upbeat, danceable instrumentation contrasts with the dark lyrical content. “It’s one of those things when you’re dancing along and you really get to know the song, and it’s like ‘Whoa?’” he comments. “Why do we have to be in the dark in our own room to get to the heavy stuff? I think we should talk about it. Let’s make fun of it. Let’s dance it out and talk about it. Plus, it’s more fun to dance along to music that isn’t forcing you to be happy.”

Creating pop bangers like “Gift Of Loneliness” or “Laundry Day” that will make you instantly make you move on the dance floor is something KENTON really enjoys. “I love dancing; I love expressing myself through movement, and a bop is a bop,” he comments. “It’s just so much more fun to do dance music, and everybody in the room feels lighter, and you get these moments where it hits, and everyone is like ‘Yeah!’”

There are also a handful of softer piano ballads on the record, too, like “What If I Was Never Born,” which allows KENTON to be more experimental. “With the softer piano ballads like ‘What If I Was Never Born,’ I get to be more creative and take bigger risks in form and telling stories that have less finished content,” he says. “There is just more space. With dance songs, a lot of times, it’s verse-chorus, and you’re lucky if you get a bridge. Something that is slower, you can use words that are a little more complicated because you’re not gonna miss it under the bass line.”

Sonically, “Wannabe American” is a huge departure from the rest of the record, going into a much more classic rock vibe with an exhilaratingly headbanging guitar solo from Tiana Ohara. “I think there’s a lot of Talking Heads influence in that, and as a kid of the 2000s, I really wanted to acknowledge that world, the world I came up in, and the world I hear as American music,” says KENTON. “I wanted to give Sheryl Crow a shoutout with the sound … When it comes to the guitar solo, what is more American than a guitar solo and letting that speak. I was really inspired by that … It’s funny, I think, to have such a Bruce Springsteen-y heavy, heavy electric guitar sound coming from a badass Asian woman and be like ‘This is America.’”

Concluding Comments

Sweetmouth is set to drop on October 17. “Sweetmouth is something that adults will often say to children when they are very good at complimenting parents or just saying the nice things that the parents want them to say, and is very much praised in Taiwanese culture and Chinese cultures,” reflects KENTON. “When it is so pressed into you for so long that your sole job is to fulfill your parents’ happiness and to keep your family afloat, then you have so little chance to really connect with who you are and what you want because you’re told as a kid that this is your contribution to the family.

Sweetmouth was one of my nicknames growing up. I named it that because it is my reclaiming of that phrase. I’m sharing this album with all the Sweetmouths out there who struggle to advocate for themselves and find themselves constantly people-pleasing … It is only by fully embracing the full spectrum of who we are and holding ourselves accountable that we will ever actually be able to dig deep into our well of joy.”

Be sure to follow KENTON on Facebook and Instagram to keep up to date with the latest announcements.