On "9 2 5," the second single from his new album The Passionate Ones, the multi-hyphenate artist Nourished by Time is up-front about his own passions. The track is sparkling at first, its synth keys and sequenced drums sounding like a Whitney Houston song and a New Order song left in a pressure cooker to simmer together. But when Marcus Brown begins singing — his voice sounding lo-fi but tender, the way a bruise can be tender — you can feel the stinging vulnerability in every tugged-on syllable, as he weighs two forms of labor: "Working restaurants by day / Writing love songs every night / He can barely make it by." Brown has been writing love songs for many years, and while distorted in the way all of his music is — raw yet accomplished, identity-forward yet sonically elusive, wringing post-punk and synth-funk into bizarro R&B balladry — they are usually colored by the stories of people trying to make it by. Indeed, nothing has inspired the wandering style of Nourished by Time quite like work, be it the toil itself or just the condition of striving.
After stints in Los Angeles and the U.K., the 30-year-old Brown moved to New York City this year. Today he's traveled down to Baltimore, where he grew up, to meet me at R. House, a food court in the city's Remington neighborhood, not far from Johns Hopkins University. Brown slides in across the booth from me holding a beer, asserting that it takes more than moving to a new city to stoke one's creative fire. "Nothing should come from outside," he says, his hands flailing, even with one in a wrist wrap due to a nagging cyst issue. "Every choice should be an internal choice — should come with some level of internal struggle."
Remington is one of Marcus Brown's hometown stomping grounds. His brother is a pastry chef at Gertrude's, a kitchen inside the Baltimore Museum of Art; the anarchist ex he was dating while writing Erotic Probiotic 2, his 2023 breakthrough release, works in the area as well. That album, a quietly released breakup record that scanned like irradiated dance music for the end times, made more noise than anticipated: Music press marked it as one of the best of the year, and the momentum facilitated a jump to the distinguished indie label XL Recordings, raising the curtain on Nourished by Time as a serious endeavor. "I never expected it to become this big thing. I wasn't really expecting anyone to hear it, and I was kind of just writing music," Brown says. "That's partly why it's maybe a little more discombobulated, and goes a lot of different places. I think it's an amazing album, but it wasn't necessarily me at 100%."
Brown has been gearing up to reach 100% for a long time, logging hours in various short-term gigs. "I've been working since I was like 14," he says, rattling off his CV — YouthWorks, Barnes & Noble, dog walker, amateur tennis coach, attendant at Floyd's Barbershop in Ellicott City and in-store shopper at Whole Foods in Los Angeles' Koreatown, which he calls his worst job ever. Brown jokes that he was radicalized in that supermarket, forced to come to terms with how little value his time and labor held to the company: "I was really just seeing the Matrix happen in real time." It was around then that he took a more active interest in progressive politics, following his curiosity from the news live stream TYT Network to journalist Aaron Maté to the political podcast Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar. When COVID hit the U.S., he ditched LA and went back home to his parents, where he committed himself to his music.
If Erotic Probiotic 2 was an accidental introduction, The Passionate Ones is far more intentional, the personal and political statement Brown has been building toward. "My goal is to reconceptualize work with this album," he explains. "You hear 'working,' you think negative. You think of oppression; you think of being exploited. But there's also the work your job doesn't want you to do, the work that sets you free — and that's creative work." These days, creative work is his full-time job, and his move to New York was prompted by a desire to follow the muse. "It's really expensive, but there's also a really romantic aspect about living there," he says. "Everyone, regardless of the medium, has come through in some way." When he does visit home, he's a scene regular again, going out to shows at beloved indie venue Ottobar and factory turned DIY art space The Compound, or browsing instrument shops for the gear he could never afford when he lived there. "So much of my experience here was so poor," he says, "so it's nice to have a little bit of spending money."
Brown grew up in Mount Washington, after a lucky break allowed his "lower-middle class" family to move from a Hamilton row house to the historic northwest district at the edge of Baltimore County. Stark class realities were right before his eyes: His grandmother lived in Mondawmin, a 12-minute drive away but a world of difference, and he attended public school but shadowed at the private Catholic prep schools Mount Saint Joseph and Calvert Hall. "Being able to have that safety and see how these older white people are living … when there's any city problem, the city comes that day to fix it. But when I go to see my grandmother, the same homes on her street had been run down and dilapidated since I was a baby. If you're paying attention, you see the two sides of it."
A performer was born in 2009 when Michael Jackson died, and videos made the rounds of his collaborations with Guns N' Roses axe man Slash. A dazzled 15-year-old Brown followed the breadcrumbs back to Jimi Hendrix, which prompted him to pick up guitar. "Everything I was learning about the guitar experience was Black to me," he says. "I'm obsessed with Eddie Hazel, and everyone else at the cafeteria is listening to Gucci and Flocka and Boosie and, like, Dom Kennedy. Which I also liked, but they couldn't get why I was listening to AC/DC." Toward the tail end of high school, a youth renaissance led by crews like Odd Future, Pro Era, A$AP Mob and Black Hippy turned the tide in hip-hop, seemingly granting an entire generation of teenagers permission to jump to the frequency Brown was already operating on. "Guitar and music, it gave me a pass to be myself — and the same people that were making fun of me for playing guitar were asking for lessons by 12th grade." He was convinced to stay the course. "By the end of it, I realized: As long as I'm myself, I'm Black," he explains. "The only people that I want acceptance from is the Black community. But I don't want it at the expense of me trying to be something I'm not."
At 17, Brown traveled to Boston to attend the Berklee College of Music. He knew he wanted to spend all his time on music but wasn't sure about the path, and going to school at least mimed the gestures of careerist ambitions. When he showed up as a freshman, the idea was to become a session guitarist on pop songs. Then his grandfather died, and grief unlocked a new challenge: "I tried to write a song about it, and it was so ass that I got obsessed with writing songs." Composition came quickly to Brown, but mostly as a "raw, intuitive" process, which set him apart from his classmates, in whom he saw a pervasive single-mindedness. "It felt like everyone's parents gave them the talk right before — like, 'You've got to make money.' "He pauses for the slightest moment. "My parents did that, too. But me even being at Berklee, they fell for my trap. Going to Berklee was just my version of not going to college.
"I'm not the biggest music theory guy," Brown admits. "I can talk about it, but when you go to a school like that, you're surrounded by the greatest musicians in the world." Music school became an opportunity to experiment, to push himself to the furthest corners and see what would happen. It's also where he met his friend and bassist Carrington Edmondson, whom he counts among the reasons for his move to NYC. "I do get a little afraid to think about what I would be doing if I didn't go there, only because of the people that I met through that experience. It was very formative." Still, there are things about learning music that go beyond instruction, toward instinct. "At Berklee, everyone assumed that musicianship carries over into songwriting," he scoffs. "It doesn't. Some of the worst songwriters I know are amazing musicians. It's a completely different muscle. Not every doctor knows how to do brain surgery."
Brown's thoughts on education are part of a larger ambivalence he holds toward institutions. He calls himself an "anti-church" guy but loves religion, noting that it ushered his mom through a tough time. Politically, he has high regard for praxis and finds theory too abstract. "A lot of people on the academic left are so well-read, but their entrance into working-class rights and race is purely theoretical. They don't have any lived experience," he says. In our conversation, he touches frequently on progressive talking points: the Overton window, corporate donations to politicians, Gaza as a rare litmus test ("If you're a true leftist, this is a no-brainer," he says). He points to Baltimore as a clear corroboration of socialist ideas in practice: "We're seeing that community projects work, less policing works, more money reinvested into the community works."
One of Brown's primary tenets is that you can't let wage work get in the way of creative work — even in a creative economy that demands a superhuman work ethic. In Los Angeles, he'd get home from his job at 11 p.m. and then work on music until 2 a.m. every day. "For me, my thing is songwriting. That was my thing for 10 years, and no one knew about it. It was my way of learning about myself, and it was an obsession. I was, I am, possessed by this hunger to create. And I think what I'm trying to say with this record is, we should focus on our personal works," he says. "It's not going to be sexy. I had to move back with my parents. I was just like, I'm gonna invest." He gave himself two years to work it out, figuring that if it didn't happen, at least he could tell himself he made something. He thanks God it did, but says he was prepared to sacrifice a lot. "I'm willing to die for it. To me, my life was for this."
Brown's singing voice has the kind of character you can't deepfake, gruff but velvety with a sheen like velour. It's the perfect pair for a production style that gathers and filters ideas learned slowly by osmosis, taking the necessary years of searching as a given. You can hear that voice locking in on a song like "Max Potential," its timbre riding the wave of crashing riffs as he howls, "If I'm gonna go insane, at least I'm loved by you." Following the breakup that defined Erotic Probiotic 2, The Passionate Ones is a rehabilitation of sorts, not-so-stealthily yearning and romantic, insistent that neither the state, mental health or even time can stand in the way of pursuing love. "What hurt the most was the things you realize about yourself in that process," Brown says of the post-separation soul-searching. "You just do more self-reflection. The Passionate Ones is less heartbreaky: I can find love again, but it doesn't have to look a certain way." That self-reflection has led him to write and sing with new purpose. "My whole life changed faster than a minute / I dreamed this life, now I'm scared to live it," he sings on "It's Time." One thing he isn't scared to do: use his new platform to say his piece. "The evidence was haunting / The world kept revolving / If you can bomb Palestine / You can bomb Mondawmin," he raps on "Baby Baby," literally bringing the issue home.
Musically, he calls the new album his crack at the alchemy of early Kanye West albums like The College Dropout or Late Registration: "The soul of the album is hip-hop, even if the music might not be exactly hip-hop." The palette is as broad as ever, moving from club styles to something he's referred to as "freaked-out soul," but the music is more focused, turning what he's learned along his journey into a more robust sound honoring his favorite music: Max Martin's supercharged pop choruses, SWV's relaxed twang, Meatloaf and Nicki Minaj's shared flair for the theatrical. "I identify this album as post-R&B," Brown declares. "FKA twigs and Frank Ocean are that, too, but this is my contribution to the genre. I just think Black music is the most expansive." He bucks "genreless" as a distinction, but shrugs when others try to mark out the references he's making in his songs: "new jack swing," "Baltimore club," "indie-pop," "neo-soul." By his analysis, a different, more vibrational kind of indexing is taking place. "If I broke this down into parts, I could use them individually for different things, right?" he says. "I think that's how I see genres. I see them as feelings — what job is this getting done?"
The Nourished by Time project seems to be balancing Berklee songcraft with something more visceral at every turn. When Brown writes, he always forces himself to create A and B sections, having routinely been unsatisfied with building around a single eight-bar loop: "It doesn't feel like a song," he says. "It feels like something for the ego." Every time he makes a record, he tries to do something he's never done before. For Erotic Probiotic 2, he learned Ableton Live, the digital audio workstation. For The Passionate Ones, 40% of which was recorded in one month earlier this year thanks to an intensifying tour schedule, he taught himself how to sample in the classic rap tradition. "I was trying to make a more concise album, but I still wanted to have the avant-garde and experimental aspects to it," he says. "In this record, I really wanted to identify as the music — like, I wanted the music to have a voice, and I didn't want to talk as much." He compares songs to a Ouija board, saying they will tell you where to go. "What's more important to me than the lyrics is the feeling of them coming out of my mouth."
Still, there is plenty of intention in the writing, which conjures a search for the American Dream in the minefield of late-stage capitalism, and the quiet revolution of persisting amidst the decay of empire. "I need a girl to cause a little civil unrest," he raps on "Baby Baby." "Tryna beat the system / Manifest a vision," he sings on "9 2 5." Even at their most casual, the lyrics feel primal, which Brown says comes from a natural instinct to speak to the proletariat: "Not everyone went to school and took Marxist classes," he cautions. "Not everyone knows what 'dialectical materialism' is. When you write about things in music, you have to write about them a certain way." R&B is a music of such passion that it has long been technically maligned, but there is no better sound to furnish Brown's gut-based form of songwriting. Tweaking its intensity and melodrama to his frequency — attaching himself to tradition, as he puts it — not only keeps him anchored amid an intuitive, exploratory process, it connects him to a deeply fundamental mode of being.
More and more, people are getting the message. In February, Nourished by Time toured with two of his indie exemplars, Toro Y Moi and Panda Bear. Last month, he hit the Lollapalooza stage, and he kicks off his first headlining tour on Sept. 11 in Baltimore. Brown beams as he recalls his experience on the road — gushing about his billmates, collecting mentors, soaking up game. "I feel like I'm a rookie in the NBA," he says. "The misconception when you get signed is that you're supposed to just go crazy, make all this money, ball out. Nah." He points to Dev Hynes, Mac DeMarco and Beach House as examples of indie artists whose true breakthroughs came only after staying the course and establishing themselves across several albums, and he seems to be charting a similar trajectory for himself in his mind's eye.
With new visibility comes an aspect of this work that can only be learned by doing: maintaining your artistic identity in spite of greater and greater expectations. "Something I learned on tour is that the audience can't open up until you open up," he says. "All of this is so absurd that I'm going to be more absurd. It opens me up. I would be remiss if I wasn't myself, with all this attention." In the process, he has become a case in point for his own thesis: Work can be creative labor, and creative labor can be both a way to make a living and a way to define oneself. For years, Brown defined success largely in terms of the grind, where the only indicator of progress was whether he'd made something or not on a given day. Now, his lived experience suggests a grander, subtler version of success is closer than he ever imagined. As he sings on the album cut "Crazy People," "It took me 10 years — but I'm on time."
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