Nourished By Time: Eyes Open
With an intrepid resolve to traverse genres and eras, Nourished By Time has forged a sound which feels simultaneously timeless and unmistakably modern. On his latest album ‘The Passionate Ones’, songwriter/producer Marcus Brown builds on his 2023 debut with confidence to spin a multi-layered story of political disillusionment, aspiration and – crucially – hope.
In 2019, Marcus Brown – then in the embryonic stage of his new musical project Nourished By Time – sold most of his belongings and packed what remained into his 2014 Mazda 3 before beginning the long drive from LA back to his native Baltimore.
After two years of chasing pavements in the city of angels, he had grown tired of trying to make ends meet while banging on the door of a zeitgeist which refused to respond. “I was going through mental health problems and, I don’t know, I just didn’t really understand the music industry,” Marcus (who had been recording and releasing tracks under a different alias prior to NBT’s genesis) recalls. “I didn’t have any money and I didn’t have any time to write music, the whole system felt like a scam.”
After admitting his disillusionment in a heartfelt conversation with the mother of his bassist Carrington [Edmondson], Marcus called time on Los Angeles and set about planning the meandering route back to his hometown. Stopping off at Salt Lake City (“really cool”), Las Vegas (“kind of annoying, the whole place is like Times Square”) and the flatlands of Kansas, he stayed in budget hotel chains and acquainted himself, for the first time, with a sizeable portion of the USA.
“I was really in no rush. It’s not like I had anything else to do,” he laughs about it now. “Those drives were pretty insane; I remember my leg was swollen afterwards from hours on the pedal. The trip gave me a different perspective though - you learn a lot of things if you’re paying attention.”
Marcus continues: “Driving back to Baltimore was probably the best decision I’ve made, it just gave me so much space to write. I was very stuck In LA, I was working constantly and I still couldn’t afford anything.” But did this return to his roots ever feel like a step backwards, we wonder? “I already was backwards!,” he laughs. “Returning to Baltimore was me neutralising. I just needed something positive to happen in my life, and going back to zero was the best way. I’ve always been really confident in my ability to make music, so I was kind of excited that I would have more space to do that.”
At this point, just two tracks had been released under the Nourished By Time moniker: the funk-tinged gospel of ‘De Ja Vu’ and an early version of ‘Rainwater Promise’. “Nourished By Time was my last attempt at music,” he says, reflecting. Overlooking the opportunity to string this period into a cinematic origin story, he instead recounts it earnestly as a matter of fact: “If you want to be an artist today, you’re gonna have to sacrifice something, and I needed more time to write music without constantly trying to pay rent.”
This strong-headed willingness to sacrifice oneself in the name of ambition informs much of Nourished By Time’s aptly named new album, ‘The Passionate Ones’, which arrived this summer. Today, Marcus is speaking to DIY from Utrecht, Netherlands (one of 18 stops on his European tour in support of the new LP). He’s audibly tired and intermittently distracted, as he navigates his way around the city while on the phone. “Oh shit!,” he interrupts himself at one point, “sorry, I just saw a guy almost get hit by a bus.”
Nevertheless, he’s a sharp interviewee - someone as keen to listen as he is to speak, and whose conversational manner invites parallels with his songwriting. He’s an open book, under no illusions of his own grandeur, and is laid back to an almost goofy extent; clearly, though, he’s not one to be underestimated, deftly offering a flash of stark perceptiveness here, or an insightful turn of phrase there.
Following his 2019 relocation to Baltimore, Marcus took frequent trips northward to New York, staying with his girlfriend at the time or crashing with friends, as Nourished By Time graduated steadily from a stagger towards a self-assured strut. Writing incessantly and self-releasing a string of tracks over the following years, he was stepping into himself as an artist with newfound liberation. And meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, seeds of opportunity had also started sprouting thousands of miles away.
Soon, a British music fan stumbled across Nourished By Time’s self-released cuts online; tracks which – even now – unmistakably carry NBT’s signature concoction of shimmering synths, drum machines, and reverberated baritone. Said fan took them to ambient pop artist Bianca Scout, before Scout played the songs to London tastemaker label Scenic Route (Acopia, BLACK FONDU), who in turn got in touch with Marcus to learn more about the project.
It’s the kind of butterfly effect that every songwriter envisions, if only momentarily, while uploading their compositions to Bandcamp and waving them off into the vast chasm of the web. “It was like a series of referrals via the internet,” he says of the chain reaction, describing it as “a pretty old school way of being found, but also kinda modern at the same time” - a fitting break for an artist whose poetic marriage of nostalgic sound palettes and contemporary ideas would go on to make Nourished By Time a singular prospect in the music landscape.
There may not have been a red carpet awaiting him, nor a gaggle of screaming fans at the airport, but Marcus arrived in London as a validated artist whose fanbase was growing steadily before his eyes. “I wasn’t really thinking about it too much,” he shrugs. “But it definitely felt like I had gone further than I’d ever gone in LA. I feel like people in London were way more interested in what I was doing.”
Thus, the stage was set for his artistic arrival proper: in 2023, he dropped his debut Nourished By Time LP ‘Erotic Probiotic 2’, before being scooped up by indie behemoths XL Recordings (Radiohead, Fontaines DC, BADBADNOTGOOD) for ‘The Passionate Ones’.
It’s a sophomore endeavour which sees NBT simultaneously excavating deeper within himself, and reaching further outward than ever before. In particular, his political commentary benefits from a bolder, more focused delivery: “We can’t keep having masters”, Marcus proclaims on ‘It’s Time’; later, he caricatures capitalist ideas on the breathy, relentless ‘BABY BABY’, namechecking the Baltimore shopping mall where African-American Freddie Gray was arrested - and later killed in police custody - in 2015 (“If you can bomb Palestine / You can bomb Mondawmin”).
“I’ve become more and more of a leftist over time,” he says today. “I’ve spent most of my life at the lowest part of the system, and you start to understand the order of things in a very visceral way.” Having previously worked jobs as a bookseller, construction worker, barber, cashier and thrift shop buyer, he’s amassed a CV which reads like a bingo card of American precarity. “I’ve seen how the chain of command works: from an assistant manager, to a manager, to a regional manager, to, you know, like a president or whatever: all these people have an anxiety issue, and they just push it down to the people beneath them.”
An early infatuation with hip hop opened his eyes to the value, be it artistic or societal, of holding power to account - think early Kanye (the ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’ era, not the ‘slavery was a choice’ era) and Eminem (during a time when the rapper was regularly lampooning figures of authority in his bars and calling out the Iraq war). Marcus is keen, however, to clarify that his route into political lyricism was an experiential one, rather than an aesthetic decision. “I never really thought about being a leftist artist. I was always writing music and I just got more politically engaged,” he reasons. “The more I learned, the more left I became. That’s how this stuff ended up in my music.”
American leftism, of course, is its own spectacle - part Cold War hangover, part propaganda fog, part fractured fantasies of democracy. Marcus’ parents lean left (his father previously worked for the NAACP and encouraged his son to read up on social causes) but grew up in the era when socialism was considered taboo and communism an existential threat. “If I ask my grandmother about Bernie Sanders, she says: ‘yeah, I like him but, well, that whole socialist thing’,” he laughs. “‘Cos she comes from the time of the red scare and people being jailed for being socialist, right? I think we’re only just now waking up from that propaganda.”
The success of Nourished By Time has now found Marcus ascending the rungs of his own industry ladder, running an operation and employing people through the project. “I guess it’s cool because I can use the money that we make to create community spaces or just give back in ways that I didn’t have growing up,” Marcus deduces after a pause, even if he does sound momentarily squeamish about the notion of being a boss (a word he delivers over the phone with implied air quotes). “I don’t have to pay people the bare minimum and I don’t have to treat people terribly. I think the problem is that a lot of bosses are removed from labour, whereas I’m at the centre of the labour. CEOs of companies who don’t ever have to see their workers will pay them really badly and feel like they justify it because the workers aren’t humanised to them.”
Marcus catches himself in another political digression before he revisits the initial point at hand. “But, to answer your initial question,” he resets in an affable tone, “yes. It is kinda strange being, like, the boss.”
Consumer culture’s looming presence isn’t left to run ragged through ‘The Passionate Ones’ unopposed, though, and Nourished By Time proves to be a galvanising narrator throughout, harnessing the hard-headed aspiration of classic Kanye LPs ‘The College Dropout’ and ‘Late Registration’. Over the course of an album which stands to document the conflict between a system designed to make us dream and fail, and the protagonist’s belief that humanity can prevail, the joyous piano chords and Baltimore Club influences of ‘9 2 5’ mark a climactic plot point, as Marcus laments the daily grind in one of 2025’s most immediate earworms.
Elsewhere, ‘Cult Interlude’ builds the world of ‘The Passionate Ones’, adding texture and depth while gesturing towards a nation’s inability to see beyond a political ideology which is harming more voters than it is aiding. Hitting like a Lynchian fever dream, the two-minute interlude pairs sampled dialogue from a documentary about cults with undulating synth chords which could have been lifted directly from Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack.
It’s an album fit to burst with touchstones and ideas, delivered with enough sleight of hand to make the mass of allusions disappear in service of the bigger picture. “Growing up, my dad loved jazz and my mom was really into pop music, and R&B… there was a lot of R&B. Baltimore shares similar tastes with the South, so me and my friends liked Outkast and T.I.,” Marcus says of his syncretistic pool of influences. “I started playing guitar when I was in high school and that kinda opened me up even more to acts like The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Hendrix, then pretty much everything else.”
While ‘The Passionate Ones’ captures the charismatic first-person flow of hip hop and the anarchic bite of punk, the heart-on-sleeve romance of slow-jam R&B weaves its own confident thread over the album’s tracklist. “Baby if you love me / Maybe I’ll surrender”, Marcus submits on ‘When The War Is Over’; “If I’m gonna go insane, at least I’m loved by you”, he resolves elsewhere on ‘Max Potential’. The album works as a lenticular print, or a Rorschach inkblot test: it’s as much a love story set against an unforgiving neoliberalist backdrop as it is a civic call to arms; a rose sprouting from the cracked concrete of a cold economic landscape.
Where Nourished By Time’s debut was written and recorded with the freedom of an artist with relatively few followers, ‘The Passionate Ones’ marks the first body of work which Marcus created in the knowledge that it was going to reach people.
“I thought that would affect things, but I’ve just been writing for too long - I don’t think the music’s ever really affected by pressure, or anything else that’s going on in my life really,” he shrugs. “I’m really grateful for that, to be honest… there’s nothing that’s going to stop me from writing music, and I’m always gonna find something to be inspired by. The world is too beautiful and big and crazy and ridiculous and sad to not be inspired all the time.”
Marcus’s refusal to be sidetracked by distractions while keeping his eyes open to the world around him is something of a superpower - a skill which will not only serve him well as Nourished By Time inevitably reaches an ever-expanding global audience, but – as ‘The Passionate Ones’ proves – enables him to endow even the most foreboding of settings with tender humanity. As he says himself: you learn a lot of things if you’re paying attention.
‘The Passionate Ones’ is out now via XL Recordings.
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