The Lush Pain Music of Nourished by Time

Marcus Brown’s voice is a crooner’s voice, a baritone, emanating notes from some spot in his body deeper than his chest. Biologically speaking, this is impossible. But taking in his vocal, its dark timbre and real dimensionality, one feels perplexed and forced to come up with an explanation. Occasionally, Brown, who makes mesmerizing, lovelorn music under the name Nourished by Time, is a serenader reaching for the style of Jodeci or SWV—sinewy, solicitous, but alien underneath the ad-libbing. He can be scarily operatic, showing flashes of Meat Loaf. He can be witty and deadpan, like Nate Dogg, or a croaker, like Keith Sweat if he had a feel for play, say, doing purposeful and provocative nasal singing. I haven’t yet had the chance to watch Nourished by Time perform live onstage, but I am eager to see how he makes and inhabits a temporary world, given how much theatre and performance are already embedded in his singing.

Nourished by Time, who is thirty-one, has just come out with his second full-length album, called “The Passionate Ones,” a fitting title for a romantic who is working out, with each output, how he might survive the culture of soul-killing cynicism he was born into. All around him, there is misery and hoarded wealth, work and little love. Not everyone wants to—or can—assimilate spiritually. A preoccupation of Brown, who calls himself a songwright, and who identifies as a leftist, is the twinned sufferings of the worker and the lover, both desperate for refuge, or, perhaps, more bleakly, for a release from the systems in which they cannot succeed. “Max Potential,” a song on the new record, exploits self-improvement gospel to explore this maladjustment. An echoing, disembodied voice asks, as a synth drifts in, “You’re on earth to maximize your potential, know what I’m sayin’?” Later, Nourished by Time makes a proclamation, supported by a grungy guitar: “If I’m going to go insane, at least I’m loved by you.” The title of the album is a reference to Prince’s “The Beautiful Ones”—a song that some have interpreted as a veiled plea to Vanity, Prince’s muse. Nourished by Time, though, is channelling a loftier, spiritual reading—the passionate ones are a tribe, the artists perforce.

Brown was born and raised in Baltimore. It is a myth city, in the way that Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia are myth cities: they live in the minds of foreigners as magical and troubled dens, places that outsiders feel a need to understand. The presence of Baltimore is strong in Brown’s music; one gets a sense of his roots without even reading his interviews. Earlier releases—for a few years, he made guitar-driven music under different names, first Riley with Fire, and then Mother Marcus—show shades of Baltimore breakbeats, driving and frantic, undergirding his indie sound. “The Passionate Ones” pays homage to the Black club pioneer Rod Lee’s classic “Dance My Pain Away.” And, in his lyrics, Brown often evokes the melancholia of the post-industrial environment: “Young breathing in them toxins / used to have a third place, but now they have no options,” he sings on “Hell of a Ride,” a song from the 2024 EP “Catching Chickens.”

An interviewer, from Cult Classic magazine, asked Brown, last year, if he had grown up going to D.I.Y. shows in Baltimore—the city of JPEGMafia, Beach House, Animal Collective. “No, honestly,” Brown replied. “I was a really sad, depressed kid that, like, never left the house.” Much of his early musical education took place on YouTube. When Brown was young, he would play around with his father’s old guitar; one day, his father noticed a popped string. His dad asked if he wanted to learn how to play the instrument, for real, and he took his son to a pawn shop to buy a used guitar, and got him lessons. Within a couple of years, Brown, who also played in his high school’s marching band, was good enough to get into Berklee College of Music. Notwithstanding one instructor, who encouraged idiosyncrasy, Brown felt that the institution wanted him to make formulaic pop music. So he left. He spent the next few years producing music while holding down regular jobs—in construction; at Barnes & Noble.

Pop is no pejorative to Brown, or to the listeners who love how he puts synth pop in dialogue with rock music and R. & B. I’m not the first to note that he can seem like an emissary from the early nineties, a pupil of DeVanté Swing, bringing the ghost of that R. & B. subgenre to a breathier, freakier fresh register. One thing that makes his work so attractive is the quality of artisanship; the structures (a tinny introductory piano, joined by a bass line and swelling chords) are authoritative—we are in the hands of a disciplined producer—but the atmosphere he creates feels spacious, big enough to hold any manner of high emotional sensitivity: grief, elation. “We want to hear the pain music,” the writer and chronicler of Baltimore club culture Lawrence Burney once said. Nourished by Time makes lush pain music. I’d been put onto Brown a few years ago, around the time that he’d débuted as Nourished by Time—a reference to the canonical indie band Guided by Voices. For Brown, the allusion is an unjaded embrace of the lo-fi evolution they brought—he is an internet-era artist who doesn’t feel the need to shirk genre forebears. It’s so confrontational, the earnestness of Brown’s project. He is also indexing the purity of artist suffering: the years spent in the private place of creation, tinkering and toiling, praying that something true emerges. “Erotic Probiotic 2,” released in 2023, is a memoir-ish work about a heartbreak, but the plaintiveness is turned outward. Nourished by Time is a giver. “Gotta show you more, gotta give you more than using words,” he sings, on the song “Soap Party,” from that record.

Brown has spent the past decade or so trying out cities: Los Angeles, London, back to Baltimore—where he lived, for a time, in his parents’ basement, and recorded most of “Erotic Probiotic 2”—and, finally, New York City. A neat narrative of “making it” is tempting. He’s signed now to XL Recordings, a coveted indie label. Having once supported acts such as Vagabon and Dry Cleaning on the road, he’s gearing up for a solo tour this fall. Tyler, the Creator recently gave him a shout-out in an interview. “Hell of a Ride” was chosen by Spotify as one of the best songs of the year—a blessing and a curse. (“It’s way busier of a song than I would really write now,” he told Rolling Stone, recently.) He knows he’s on the precipice of genuine fame, but Brown doesn’t seem to find wealth, the disconnection that it brings, a generative muse. “I just want enough money that I can be comfortable, raise a family, buy a house, and start a business,” he has said.

It is one thing to be a musician. It is another to work as one. A track I listen to again and again on “The Passionate Ones” is “9 2 5.” Performed from a third-person perspective, the perspective of the blues, Nourished by Time spins an old-fashioned yarn about a man working a restaurant job and writing ballads at night. The mood is bleak; the man is high. But in the second verse the emotional charge changes to forthright, exhortative, almost gospel: “May they multiply you / May the river guide you.” Another favorite of mine is “When the War Is Over,” which might be one of the more beautiful songs to come out this year. A love song set to a boom-bap beat, it comes near the album’s end, and it acts like a cleanse to the agony and need that had preceded it: “Baby if you love me, I’ll surrender.” “The Passionate Ones” catches your weariness, and, with a dreamer’s stubbornness and irrationality, asks if you would consider transforming it, even for a while. It’s got that fever, this album, the American tears-on-the-dance-floor, we-gon’-make-it energy. It’s what you want to listen to, during this summer of divided consciousness, and in the colder seasons to come. ♦