Nourished by Time: Trust the Process

Marcus Brown – a.k.a. the genre-defying syncretist Nourished by Time – began creating his dreamlike, uncanny sound as an escape from the crushing monotony of his day job. What started as a lifeline evolved into an opportunity to reshape his world

Marcus Brown may have written Hell of a Ride – Crack Magazine’s favourite track of 2024 – a year before Americans reelected Donald Trump, but 12 months on, his prescient breakup jam manages to fit both the moment’s spirit of disappointment and its need for courage. The song is not a resignation letter, or an expat anthem – although the 29-year-old Baltimore singer and producer says he has found a community of artists in London. Instead, it’s a triumphant ode to resolve – to pressing on, no matter how potholed the road ahead might be. “Goodbye, baby, goodbye/ To the red, the blue and even the white,” he cheers, as gleaming guitar and piano melodies shimmer beneath him. For Brown, who once drove alone from Los Angeles to Baltimore to work through a “mental breakdown”, there’s some good in every goodbye.

Brown is better known as Nourished by Time – a moniker inspired by lo-fi indie rockers Guided by Voices and the observation that his own musical skill seems to improve with age. “As I kept writing music and got older, I got better at it,” he explains succinctly during a mid-November video call from Brooklyn, where he’s cat-sitting for a friend. The professed lover of basketball isn’t simply aspiring for Most Improved Player; ‘Nourished’ implies enrichment and focus – qualities manifest in the artist’s sensuous collages of house, new wave, R&B, gospel and DIY pop. Although Brown describes himself as a kid of the “iPod age” of bespoke song libraries, his dreamy and defiant music feels more rooted in the subconscious than in curation. And while his lyrics sometimes seem to respond directly to headlines, Brown’s songs at heart explore the fears, fantasies and fixations of the dormant mind. “But have you ever prayed for your own invention?” he asks on the ballad Quantum Suicide, from his 2023 debut album Erotic Probiotic 2.

In conversation, Brown is a warm, cheery spirit, quick to laugh and prone to talking with his arms – one of which is enclosed in a wrist brace as he recovers from a cyst removal. He sports multiple rings, a buzzcut and light stubble, and often slips into a playful smile as he recounts the whirlwind year he’s had since Erotic Probiotic 2 introduced him as an eccentric syncretist. Just count the highlights: he signed with XL Recordings, toured with California’s synth-pop sensations Magdalena Bay, and released an EP, Catching Chickens, that he feels “encapsulates me and my imagination”. He also collaborated with psychedelic rap producer Evilgiane and twee indie-pop singer Kacy Hill – just two of the many artists he’s now rubbing shoulders with as he flits between London, New York and Baltimore.

Eager to continue refining his music and proving his talent, Brown has even bigger plans for 2025. He’s currently finishing up The Passionate Ones, an album dedicated to the “dreamers” toiling in the “fields” he invoked on Erotic Probiotic 2. He was once one of them, he recalls with gratitude and disbelief. “That’s all I was doing for ten years to get to this point,” he says, alluding to jobs as a barber, tennis instructor and retail bookseller. He’s still surprised by that album’s reception. “I didn’t even know the album was gonna happen that way,” he says, reflecting on the acclaim and attention that followed. He doesn’t listen to it often, citing the mixing and the singing – which he recorded during a bout with Covid – as not up to his standard. He also feels ambivalent about the circumstances that birthed it. “That album was just a ball of emotion,” Brown explains, noting that in addition to being sick, he was wrecked by a breakup he thought was going to “end my world” and working at Whole Foods for little pay.

Brown’s formal role at the grocer was “shopper”, he says, which involved bagging orders for online customers and stocking shelves. But he also worked the cash registers and had to sanitise shopping carts. As he sprayed them down, he’d listen to left-leaning podcasts and think, “One day, I’m gonna overthrow this Whole Foods!” he says, with a theatrical shout that melts into a laugh.

Catching Chickens, his debut release for XL, comes from a less anguished headspace. The songs are slicker and brasher than those on Erotic Probiotic 2, with the title referencing a scene in Rocky II where the boxer chases a hen around a dirt lot to improve his footwork and agility. That film sequence is offbeat, whimsical and hell-bent – moods Brown channels throughout the EP’s five tracks, Hell of a Ride among them. The songs, which explore desire and relationships, are quietly subversive. “Have you never loved somebody?” Brown purrs on the propulsive Hands on Me, his delivery belying the strangeness of the question. Excuse me? “Loved somebody/ Have you ever tried?” Over Poison-Soaked’s crashing drums and fuzzy chords, he tenderly sings, “A love will place you back in the past.” Then comes the bittersweet punchline: “And then evaporate and leave you alone.” He likes to torque familiar idioms and images of romance into uncanny shapes.

Brown’s catalogue is full of hazy memories and uncertain forecasts, themes that congrue with his nostalgic yet alien production. His fusionist style often functions as a Rorschach test. Critics, including me, have compared it to Latin freestyle, new jack swing, quiet storm and Baltimore club – reference points that Brown hadn’t really considered previously, and doesn’t dwell on now. “To be honest, I didn’t really think about it much until people started writing about my music,” he says of his relationship to genre. Although he champions 90s R&B, calling it “some of the best music written”, he doesn’t simply reproduce it or the sound of his other influences, which include David Bowie, Dean Blunt and Angel Olsen. He’s a mutator and seeker, always eager to discover new sounds and arrangements, filtering them through his pliant baritone. “I like to make music that I haven’t really heard before,” he says.

Brown is now more confident in his ability to harness this sense of curiosity. He says The Passionate Ones is pushing his ideas further than ever before. He’s started sampling more and inserting additional piano parts, a shift from his usual habit of building songs around guitar melodies. He’s also been exploring his voice, and cites Coko of early 90s R&B vocal trio SWV and Whitney Houston as inspirations – singers with notably higher registers than his. “This is the most experimental I’ve been with my voice,” he says proudly.

The influences for The Passionate Ones are intriguingly vast. He describes it as a “meatloaf” of Kanye West’s The College Dropout, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint, and the rising multipart harmonies of SWV and Jodeci. He’s also been listening to Italian film composer Ennio Morricone lately. But Brown seems most excited about new developments in his writing. “I really like the lyrics on this new album. I’ve been focusing more on telling my story,” he says, referring to both his biography and his mental health journey. “But at the same time, it’s more outwardly critical of government and just society than the first two projects,” he says, ready, perhaps, to instigate that Whole Foods revolt.

Brown was born and raised in Baltimore, where his parents still live and his sibling works as a pastry chef. Though his dad was a 90s hip-hop head and bass player, and he fondly recalls his mom listening to the gospel-dominated soundtrack of The Preacher’s Wife, Brown’s relationship with music was tacit until high school. After being scolded by a school security guard on orientation day for wandering the halls, he and a friend were given a choice: go to the band room or the choir room. The pair chose the former, and Brown ended up participating in the marching, symphonic and jazz bands, playing the bass drum, the trombone and, finally, the guitar. He struggled with the latter, nearly quitting, but after a teacher helped him with chords and reading sheet music, he became obsessed with the instrument. “From there, I just never stopped.” Private lessons followed, and he’d sometimes skip class just to practice.

Next came Berklee College of Music in Boston, though he didn’t really like school. “The structure of schooling is just so weird to me. I don’t do well in classrooms, and I don’t do well having to memorise. I like experience-based learning,” Brown says. But his parents, one of whom didn’t attend college, insisted that higher education was a must, so music school became a compromise. Brown initially worried about not having enough experience to compete with kids who’d been playing music since early childhood, but confidence carried him. “I knew I was good enough.”

After graduating, he moved back to Baltimore, where a job at Barnes & Noble became a grind. “I would go to work, go home, drink beer and make music, and that’s just all I would do.” He eventually saved up money to move to Los Angeles, but out west, the cycle repeated and intensified due to costs. His decision to save money by not purchasing a parking spot for his Koreatown apartment became a regular headache. “I would get home really late, and I would have to look for parking for like half an hour, bro,” he says with exasperation. After securing a space, he’d work on music for a few hours before crashing out. He released some of that material as Riley With Fire and Mother Marcus, but Nourished by Time became the identity that stuck as he worked, parked, wrote, slept, and repeated. “I came up with Nourished by Time as a mantra for what I was experiencing,” he says. Frustration became fate.

These drab 9-to-5 experiences, and all the spirit-destroying life admin that comes with them, are pillars of his music, which often wrests hope from the everyday. “I’m high in a grocery line/ I don’t have much money/ But I do what I want with my time,” Brown sings on The Fields, another standout track from Erotic Probiotic 2. “When it ain’t no remedy/ Then I get my weapons from the clouds,” he sings on oddball producer and singer Yaeji’s ebullient Happy. Asked about his frequent use of naturalistic and cosmic imagery in lyrics and videos, Brown says, “That’s my way of creating a world that I wish existed.” His gauzy music doesn’t just long for escape or relief; it uses those emotions to charge into new realms.

His imagined worlds are never solitary. Although Brown records alone, helming the writing, instrumentation, performing and mixing, in conversation, he often mentions his tourmates, especially Carrington Edmonson, his bassist for US gigs. One of his favourite parts of getting paid for shows is putting “that money back into the pockets of other musicians” – retainers that presumably help his colleagues avoid the ruts he knows all too well. Brown also frequently praises A&Rs and other workers in the music industry. When I ask him what a left-wing music industry might look like, before envisioning better payouts from streams and more opportunities for women, he quickly notes, “It can’t be a hundred percent artists, or there is no industry.”

Brown seems to aspire to be a new kind of bedroom producer: autonomous but not isolated, self-possessed but committed to collective uplift. Notably, his songs evoke shop floors and workspaces alongside clubs and parties. “Dreaming of the ladies of the night or the day/ Memories of factory lines long as I’m paid,” Brown sings on Erotic Probiotic 2’s folksy Workers Interlude, where he alludes to enslaved Black people picking cotton in blistering heat. His most direct line in this vein comes on Catching Chickens’ soulful torch song Romance in Me: “It’s the future/ And we’re in it together,” he croons over a sinuous guitar melody. 

This communal sentiment will be at the heart of The Passionate Ones, which Brown sees as both the next phase of his artistry and a thank-you to all the teachers, collaborators and musicians who have nurtured his talent amid these atomised times. “I just wanted to be more grateful for my situation and make an album that other people could be inspired by, because I’ve been inspired by so many other albums,” he says. The nourished becomes the nourisher.