KENTON Channels Intimacy and Catharsis in “Let Light In,” the Final Track on His album Sweetmouth
Old lacquer cracks don’t ruin the bowl; they reveal the story—and gold can be poured into the fracture until the damage becomes design. KENTON closes his album Sweetmouth with “Let Light In,” a contemporary R&B benediction staged like a confessional under cathedral acoustics: piano notes placed with careful hands, strings (violin and cello) rising in slow, tidal swells, and background vocals hovering like witnesses who refuse to look away. The performance leans “live” in spirit—less studio gloss, more breathing room—so his velvety voice can carry the weight of the room. Chill and epic at once, the arrangement feels orchestral not for spectacle, but for emotional scaffolding, as if the music itself is holding him upright while he tells the truth.
Lyrically, “Let Light In” functions as a self-addressed letter and a moral inventory: a reckoning with shame, self-erasure, and the exhausting theater of survival—“I shrank myself to nothing / To stay in the room.” KENTON’s own description frames it as a refusal to keep “sweeping blood behind closed doors,” and the song’s arc honors that decision by moving from haunted interior monologue (“listening to the dead,” losing wars in his head) toward a painstaking consent to renewal. The hook—“let light in”—repeats like a lever you pull until the stuck window finally opens; each return makes the phrase less metaphor and more practice. Context deepens the resonance: the Los Angeles-based artist, raised in sunny Irvine by Taiwanese immigrants, grew up negotiating belonging as an Asian American while absorbing music at home through his father’s teaching—songcraft as inheritance, and now as rescue. By the end, the listener doesn’t just observe catharsis; they feel their own chest unclench, as though the track has handed them permission to forgive, to breathe, and to step toward brightness without pretending the dark never happened.
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Old lacquer cracks don’t ruin the bowl; they reveal the story—and gold can be poured into the fracture until the damage becomes design. KENTON closes his album Sweetmouth with “Let Light In,” a contemporary…