Nourished By Time is finding passion in the paradox

Marcus Brown understands the art of that deal; that your small step will cost you more than you have to give, and that in taking that step you will feel alone and awfully small in too big a city and much too huge a world. That we must work to live, and that artists are permitted to use their one hand so long as they have rent in the other. The causes lie deeply and simply, multiplied millions of times. They lie in the clock-in grind on the warehouse floor, the social workers locked in give and no take, the double shifts and the young people with degrees and debt as their pay cheque slips through their fingers from boss to landlord, boss to landlord.

All around the world, in this capitalist fallout and uneven land, minds still ache to create. Still, one promise remains: that humans, unlike anything else in the universe, can grow beyond their work, ascend the stairs of their ideas, and offer something that will better not the self but the collective. And it is from this wreckage of existential thanklessness of the 21st century, teeth broken and bloody from the boot but with soul intact, staggers out Nourished By Time. Marcus Brown’s music, and the radical thing it represents, is what makes us distinctive in the universe. The Passionate Ones.

This is the name Brown gave his second album, his first full-length release under the countercultural independent label, XL Recordings. It’s a dream negotiated out of that old pact with staying afloat.

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A singer and producer and cultural time traveller, Brown's debut album, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, announced an artist whose music is an ultra-vivid burst of feeling, filtered through the half-remembered mirages of synth-pop, electro-funk, new wave and Baltimore club on which he was raised. Entire worlds and histories are realised in a sound reborn from those ashes. Floor-fillers for the end times. These are raw, impassioned cries against numbness; sermons for the possibility for deliverance from our dead ends.

On Brown’s first release on XL, 2024’s Catching Chickens, his defining song “Hell of a Ride” straddles the knife’s edge between 80s dance euphoria and an elegy for the rot of late-stage capitalism. “The red, the blue and even the white… never felt like mine”, he belts on its chorus after acerbic social commentary; an impassioned baritone of catharsis without self-consciousness or fear. These seemingly contradicting forces, the sound and the substance, go down together like good medicine.

When I talk with Brown, he is in his car because it’s the easiest way to avoid a parking ticket. He is moving to New York, just one in a string of new realities since his newfound success which are in conflict with his principles. “I think I’m part of a problem, honestly,” he says. “I think a big portion of what I’ve been trying to do was prove that you don’t need to move to New York and London and LA to do this. I did almost everything from Baltimore, you know. We need to stop moving to these big cities. Like, I don’t know why the fuck I moved here. I mean, I’m excited to be here, but it’s against my better judgement.”

A few years ago in Los Angeles, Brown’s circumstances were radically different. He worked long nights stocking shelves at Whole Foods in Koreatown – and would lose half an hour after his shift in the small hours trying to find a parking spot (he tried to save money by not purchasing one of his own). He would order food because he’d be too tired to cook, and with what few hours remained before he had to sleep, Brown would make music. There was little time left to socialise, and his dating life was reduced to blank-eyed swipes through Tinder and Hinge. And yet, this spirit-crushing mundanity was the very thing which propelled him forward; the limitation against which he could rail.

The Passionate Ones defines a time of changing conditions, but by that same token, an artist who remains fierce and unwavering in commitment to his values. Becoming a full-time musician has only underlined the 29-year-old's desire to pay it back to his community. He has a million-miles-a-minute mind which he attributes on the one hand to neurodivergence, but on the other, because he thinks on a macro scale. Everything is focused on the bigger picture; the detail of “I” can’t be considered without the implications for “we”.

“One of the biggest internal things I had to reckon with was figuring out how to maintain being a leftist while not being poor,” he shares. “I was really poor when I made my first two albums, and I guess now I’m middle class. It would be corny if I acted like I still was. You know, I’m not rich – I don’t make a tonne of money – but I’m definitely making more than what I made the first record and I still have the same feelings. I’m probably more of a leftist than I was before.

"Money hasn’t changed anything. I’m just more confused about how to help and be effective and be the type of person I wish other people could be in positions of power. I want to benefit the collective.”

He describes the success of his music as a loss of control. “Everything had changed so much,” he shrugs. “I don’t know… I felt like I was just in this vortex where people were treating me better because I had something they wanted. I guess I had a certain level of success, and people used their imaginations. I found myself accumulating a bunch of habits and addictions that I was really trying to get out of but couldn’t. It was a lot of stress and expectation I’d never had to deal with before.”

Navigating being the boss of his best friend and bassist, Carrington Edmonson, for example, is an uncomfortable and hierarchal dynamic Brown still bristles against; being a successful musician by any measure is something only a small number of people can relate to. For that, he has befriended fellow New Yorkers, Chanel Beads: “They’re so awesome, and it’s been nice to go through similar things at the same time and have someone to talk to about it. My life is just becoming more and more cartoonish, and that creates a loneliness.”

The Passionate Ones, therefore, is an offering of what Brown has lived and learned. To spare others from suffering is the only act which can prescribe worth to his own. The exuberant, piano-led club hit “9 2 5” is melancholic in its spirit – a third-person retelling of his own life which ripples outward to touch the millions like him searching for escape. Fatalistic though Brown’s songwriting can often be, with The Passionate Ones it becomes sermonic: “You won’t always be here / To be tricked and lied to / May you always have a fight / Be it wrong or be it right / Shed a raindrop when you cry / But beware of sedatives and passing time.” It’s a hateful life, he knows – but in “freaking the 9 to 5”, the dreamer won’t die.

He was inspired by the instructional hip-hop albums of his youth which detailed how to outrun your circumstances, namely The Blueprint by Jay Z and Kanye West’s College Dropout and Late Registration. “Being a Black artist in an indie space, there aren’t a tonne of reference points for what I’m doing,” Brown acknowledges. And so he resolved, on this album, to make his words count for something – to write the kind of lyrics from which people will derive strength when it is hard to find.

Creative risk is harder to take than ever, and the cultural stagnation we’ve experienced as a result has been widely explored notably by political and cultural theorist Mark Fisher and his idea of the “Slow Cancellation of the Future” in his book Ghosts of My Life. The reasons for this are systemic, and Brown has tried to actively fight against these in order to succeed as an artist. “Artists have always had to work, but you used to be able to pay for an apartment just by working one job. These major cities are a scam, and I left LA because there was no way for me to be an artist. I had to sacrifice something. Luckily, I had a decent enough relationship with my family that I could move back home into the basement and turn it into a studio. But if you really want to be an artist, you’re gonna have to sacrifice certain shit right now. It’s really not gonna be sexy. You might have to move back with your parents or live with four of five people, but your time is more important right now than your finances.”

Where you choose to place your attention is supremely consequential, Brown believes. “We have to understand the battle that is being waged against us as creators,” he says. “I accepted long ago that this probably isn’t going to happen for me – but also, no one was going to stop me because I was so in love with the process. Like, I was gonna make three more Erotic Probiotics before anyone ever knew about it. I didn’t know that album was gonna become what it did. I was just doing what I love. I obsess over certain things that I care about, and I will do something a million times if it feels good. It’s not going to get easier, and we’re going to need each other. I called it The Passionate Ones because anyone can be part of that, you just have to have a fucking dream. You just have to want something, and community is going to be the way we survive.”

More than anything – more than politics or circumstance or storytelling – The Passionate Ones is about love. The antidote and the purpose. Our saving grace as inheritors of a fucked up, dying world. “At the end of the day, I’m saying that love is the most important thing,” Brown explains. “I want it, but I don’t know how to get it – and what I have had, I’ve lost. I’m trying to outline all the things that get in the way of love, whether it’s political, emotional or spiritual. That was the point of this record.”

The influences of Nourished By Time carry the hallmarks of gauzy, timeworn memories; the same refuge and comfort as the music you heard in the back of the car as a child on the long trip home as you fell asleep. Brown lets us brush fingertips with a time we can’t return to. But there is also something decidedly strange, if not haunted, about his production, warped synths or narcotised vocals embedded in the nostalgia of it all. “I wanted to make an RnB soul album, but I wanted to freak it. I wanted to invert it,” he tells me. “If I do identify as a genre, I am post-RnB. Every other genre gets to have a ‘post’ unless it’s Black music, and I think that’s wrong. I don’t want to make people happy, I want to challenge them.”

When I ask Brown about the place nostalgia has in his work, his response is cautionary. “If you don’t inject your own shit into it, it’s not interesting. I’d rather try to emulate my heroes and fail, but that’s where the interesting things start to happen. When I sing, I try to sound like Coko from SWV or Elliot Smith – but I fail at it. My failure is a success because my skill and taste are at high levels. It’s gonna turn into something else dope, because I’ve worked hard enough and I have millions of reference points for so many things because I’m an artist and I’m interested in the art of others. Everyone is inspired by nostalgia, but I’m not reliving anything.”

The album’s penultimate song, “When The War Is Over”, is a gorgeous synth ballad which does that particular, magic thing of making you want to dance and cry. A masterclass in metamodernism, there is a sincerity to these love songs – an open-hearted, white flag surrender – which is radical in conditions where those qualities struggle to thrive. “I’ve always had a propensity for sad music. I love sad harmonies,” he says, and tells of the inspiration he drew from Meat Loaf – not only for the supreme theatricality of his voice, but for the volatile life that co-existed with it.

Asking Brown to dissect his music is near impossible because his process is so intuitive. “Talking about this record is so hard because I don’t remember it the way other people interpret it as they’re listening. I just remember the feelings and the hardships and the emotions I experienced as I was writing it. I’m always listening to what the song wants to be. I don’t have synaesthesia – I don’t think anyone has synaesthesia, I’ve always thought that was bullshit – but what I do have is this feeling in my stomach when I listen to music that is very active.

"Sometimes, I almost want to throw up if something isn’t how it’s supposed to be … I have a bad habit saying my songs aren’t about things, but every painting doesn’t have to look like something. Sometimes you want a song to be more abstract, more about a feeling than something you can see or touch. I love metaphors, but I don’t want to hide behind them.”

His politics, in particular, is like a blood-let. On the bombastic “BABY BABY” he sings: “The evidence was haunting the world kept revolving / If you can bomb Palestine, you can bomb Mondawmin / Buy anything / Just buy it fucking often.” And to Brown, it’s more than words. “I really don’t have a lot of money and I don’t want to make it seem like I’m fucking Mother Teresa either – I am definitely a flawed human, for sure – but I really do care about people and I get overwhelmed with how fucked up this world can be and how it doesn’t need to be that way. There are people who I’ve met in this world who have touched me in a way that I will always want to protect them.”

Brown grew up middle-class in Baltimore City, but his mother insisted that he go to public school because she didn’t want his world view to be limited. “I have a really broad view that has become even more broad with travel,” he says. “I was in Istanbul, and I’m there during the 30-year anniversary of this insane protest, and so there are police everywhere with machine guns coming out of tanks and all this – and I’m seeing it, and I’m just like, ‘Man, this reminds me of home. This isn’t so different to what’s happening in America’. My brain always goes to finding the commonality and finding the solution … I’m not an activist, but I have a little bit of money and I’m going to use that money to buy gear for some fans; and I’m going to give money to sex worker organisations; and I’m going to give money to Palestine.”

He tells me of an app he’d like to create so people can be paid to strike through fundraising. “I don’t care who does it – I’ll do it if I have time – but if someone gets to it, that’d be great. I feel that would help, because I just love to strike. I love a good strike, man! It’s my favourite form of protest by far. I’ve never had the opportunity to actually strike myself, but boy, have I tried! My managers have hated me for trying to organise them.”

What is clear with Brown – and perhaps the common denominator which binds him to his heroes – is his absolute self-belief. “It’s really funny you say that, because I also feel like a failure at the same time,” he says. “It’s an oscillating energy. A lot of the time, you will have to lie to yourself. But if you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will. It’s not gonna be pretty out there, and that’s why it’s important to only compare yourself to yourself. Even now, I second guess myself but at the end of the day I know I can do anything. I know I’m my worst enemy. I’m going to be the one who gets in my way. You have to focus on your time and effort, which is the only thing within your power to control. The Passionate Ones is the best that I can humanly do, but now I feel like I have even more to say and I believe I can make an even better album.

But having confidence doesn’t mean you don’t get scared: “Like, nothing is cooler than being scared and just doing it and proving yourself wrong. Failure is cool. The only failure is if you stop and you don’t do it again. God, I’ve failed a million times before Nourished By Time. A million times, a million times. No one gave a shit for ten years. But I wasn’t doing it for people to care. I was doing it because it was the only thing that made me happy. It was the only thing I was good at, and writing a song that no one is going to hear still fills me with so much joy. If you build it, they will come – but I don’t even care if they come. I just want to build it.”