Nourished by Time Makes Post-R&B Sirens for Our Dystopian Era

M
arcus Brown is eyeballing the couch in the corner of the listening room at XL Recordings’ SoHo office in New York. After observing the stitching on the leather and checking out the chrome framing, he quickly asks his publicist if it’s for sale. “My apartment kind of sucks,” Brown, who performs as Nourished By Time, says, “But it feels good.” The Baltimore native has been bopping from city to city after the release of his 2023 debut, Erotic Probiotic 2, and spent most of his time last year on tour with Toro y Moi. He is now relieved to plant feet in New York City’s latest artist mecca: Ridgewood, Queens. As he’s bracing for the rollout of his second album, The Passionate Ones (Out Aug. 22), he’s still mentally furnishing his new home. “I’m ‘bout to take this rug, too.” 

Last year, the 31-year-old songwriter, producer, and instrumentalist rubbed against the cultural zeitgeist with his apocalyptic love ballad “Hell of A Ride.” The song was part of his Catching Chickens EP and landed him on NPR’s 2024 Best Songs of the Year with its complex time signatures and futuristic chord progressions. Despite Brown being an adamant dissenter against all things streaming, “Hell of a Ride” reached 4 million streams on Spotify and was named one of the best songs of the year by the app’s editors. “It’s way busier of a song than I would ever really write now … it’s not very indicative of the music that I was trying to make,” He says. “There’s so many chords in ‘Hell of a Ride’ that it pisses me off.” 

Brown’s ability to transform a sophisticated song into an indie hit is a testament to his musical acumen. Despite growing up the son of a bass-playing dad and a mom with “really good taste in music,” his first encounter with the song-making bug was spurred after Michael Jackson’s death in 2009. While watching the wall-to-wall music videos that played on TV, Brown remembers being enamored by a clip of Jackson performing “Black or White.”  But he wasn’t moved solely by the King of Pop. “I just saw Slash playing guitar, and I was like, ‘Whoa, that looks awesome,’” Brown says of the former Guns N’ Roses guitarist. “I just kept going on YouTube. Then I found out who Jimi Hendrix was, and that was it.” After his musical awakening, Brown immediately went down to his family’s basement and began playing his dad’s acoustic guitar in secret until a popped string blew his cover. “[My dad] found the string pop, and he was like, ‘Do you want to play guitar?’ He took me to get a guitar, [and I] got some lessons. And then ever since, I haven’t gone a day without playing.”

Before Nourished By Time, the Berklee College of Music graduate published under two other music aliases. While in college, he often skipped class to work on his “experimental” project under the name Riley with Fire. During a stint in Los Angeles, funded by checks he earned working a post-grad job at Barnes & Noble back home in Baltimore, he released music under the name Mother Marcus. “I just never wanted to use my name. I always thought my name was boring as hell,” Brown says. “Also, I just love coming up with names. I have a whole notes page full of names for like movies, albums, or if I want to get rid of Nourished By Time one day.”

Brown considers Riley with Fire his school for learning how to write and produce. Mother Marcus was his internal protest— he only released two songs under the moniker. “I was very confused. I’d lost a lot of confidence. I lost a lot of hope. I didn’t really understand the streaming world, and so I just wasn’t putting music out,” Brown says. Though many of his projects live on streaming today, he says he’s never come to peace with the business model but realized he needed a vessel for his work. “I wasn’t putting myself out there, and that was what was bothering me. I was stagnant. And to me, I owed myself more.” His third and current pen name is evidence of him fulfilling that debt to himself. “Nourished By Time ate Mother Marcus and Riley with Fire and is just simpler and more efficient,” he says. “I know myself way more than I did in those other projects.” 

Brown says he’s happy with Nourished By Time, currently. With the anticipation of his second album under the name, he has no intention of bringing the Nourished chapter to a close unless it competes with his ideologies.  “The minute I feel like I can’t say free Palestine or free Congo, I can’t criticize the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, or even this streaming stuff,” Brown says. “Only then will Nourished By Time be a memory. Name one socialist pop star — it doesn’t exist. I can be a socialist rock star or something like that. But I can’t be a socialist pop star.” Brown forsees Nourished By Time going beyond just music, envisioning the project as a multimedia gateway leading into photography, video, and performance art. “I’m not in this business to be a multi-millionaire. I just want enough money that I can be comfortable, raise a family, buy a house, and start a business,” he says with some of his main goals including creating a grocery store for Black communities or an app to encourage people to strike against capitalism. “kind of like a GoFundMe for striking. Just because I feel like that’s the biggest [deterrent from people going] on strike because they can’t afford to.” 

Passionate Ones reflects Brown’s outlook on our collective reality. Completely self-produced and self-written, songs like the single “9 2 5” include Brown’s velvety voice as he paints a picture of the hamster wheel of living to work and working to live. “Baby Baby” compares the probability of bombings in Palestine to the probability of bombing malls in Baltimore in an “it can happen to anyone anywhere” sense. And “It’s Time” comes with a judgment day theme—instead of choosing sin over redemption, Brown sings of the choice between the status quo and freedom from the systems or “masters” of the world. The songs sound both futuristic and vintage, dark and light, yet simple, similar to the theme songs commissioned for children’s programming on PBS. 

While the themes of his latest album can feel heavy, each song uses the hope of finding love to erase the world’s woes — fitting for Brown’s description of his own music as “post-R&B” with vocal arrangements inspired by SWV and the, well, passion, inspired by Jodeci. “I think Passionate Ones was just me trying to take those sounds and freak them and make them weirder and kind of invert them on themselves,” he says, crediting artists like Prince, Frank Ocean, and Solange as pioneers of the post-R&B genre. “We always hear post-rock and post-punk. But you never hear post spoken about in regards to Black music.” 

With the exception of a few songs like the title track, Brown says he worked on most of the album over the course of a month between spending time in London, Baltimore, and New York. The album also includes his first attempt at sampling, using songwriter and poet Labri Siffre’s “Saved” for the track “Max Potential.” “He believed in the song,” Brown says of Siffre clearing the sample for a “reasonable price.”  “I always loved his music before, but very grateful that another Black artist is looking out for another Black artist,” He says. This album, Brown says, will also mark the last time he puts together a record without collaborations. “It was really important to me that I put out two records like this, to prove to myself that I could do this on a high level. [But] I never want to be so wrapped up and having control that I lose the magic.” Brown says he hopes Passionate Ones brings forth more love, community, and also permission to be angry for listeners. But he doesn’t expect everyone to like it. “I just feel like if everyone likes it, you haven’t done your job,” he says. “You haven’t challenged anything enough.” 

For himself, though, he hopes the aftermath of Passionate Ones will help him steady the balancing act of self-love as his prominence in music rises and his life gets more hectic .”We’re taught to hate ourselves from very young. It’s really hard to unlearn things. I think my biggest thing is, I’m really hard on myself,” Brown says, admitting that he’s still journeying to figure out how to both take time for himself and still show up for his loved ones. A huge step forward, however, has been fulfilling the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “Having an apartment now feels so much better, gives me some stability.”