Nourished by Time Is Dreaming of an Early ’90s R&B and Dance Utopia

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Photography by Alonzo Hellerbach

Marcus Brown's energy crackles, their brain motoring at full tilt, like there's always too much to talk about and never enough time to get to it all. As we stroll the stalls at their favorite flea market in Dumbo, Brooklyn, bits of their personal history and hyper-curious disposition come into focus. The 28-year-old has worked at a thrift store, a bookstore, and a Whole Foods, and wrote his recent debut album as Nourished by Time, Erotic Probiotic 2, in his parents’ basement in Baltimore. (He also has a side hustle as a tennis instructor.) A vendor selling quartz beads prompts Brown to reveal that a recent 23andMe test uncovered their Nigerian heritage. At one table, Brown sticks their hand in a bowl of marbles, commenting under their breath, "Marbles are underrated—marbles fell off, man," and then laughs.

While rifling through secondhand jewelry, he explains why, as a person with an interest in socialism, the 2003-2004 Detroit Pistons are his favorite championship basketball team of all time. "They were all role-players, and none of them were stars in their own right—that's how basketball is supposed to work, not just like LeBron James and a bunch of bench players. I love really scrappy players that don't give a fuck."

Brown approaches music-making with an extemporaneous DIY creativity, and listening to their beautifully earnest songs can feel like rummaging through a treasure box. Across Erotic Probiotic 2, he experiments with lo-fi pop, new jack swing, post-punk, hip-hop, quiet storm, Baltimore club, classic deep house, new wave, and soul, with touchstones including Arthur Russell, Tony! Toni! Toné!, and PM Dawn. Brown's rich baritone offers continuity amid their tangle of influences. He grew up mirroring the churchy vocal runs of Coko from SWV, and parts of his aesthetic are neatly summarized by one of his own tweets: "i like that little part of the early 90s (90-92) that still sounds/looks like the 80s but u can see it slowly turning into the 90s."

A month before we meet at the flea market under the Brooklyn Bridge, Brown played a show in Bushwick, in the smallest room at the warehouse club Elsewhere. It was a Monday, and his opening slot began at 9 p.m., but by the time he started his second song, the place was almost full—with fans, perhaps, of Nourished by Time's handful of Bandcamp releases, or of Brown's feature on the subtly propulsive "Happy," from Yaeji's With a Hammer, or those who had seen them open for the London post-punk band Dry Cleaning earlier this year. Brown wore a ballcap and a checked button-down tucked into his jeans, with his computer, MPC, and synthesizer set up on a card table perpendicular to the mic. As he began to sing, he melted into his role: a commanding performer even by himself on a tiny stage, owing mostly to his voice and the way he adorned his lyrics with a little two-step.

During "The Fields," a melancholy electro single in which Brown attempts to reconcile capitalism with Jesus, they kept their eyes closed, as though it was too intimate to look onto the audience, and smoothed the brim of their hat between verses. It was probably just something to do with his hands, but it affected a cool charm that worked a kind of magic with his heartbreaking vocal tone.

Nourished by Time may seem like they emerged from nowhere, but Brown has spent most of their life incubating for a rockstar moment. He was a teen basketball fanatic when he first began playing guitar at 15, almost on a lark. It was the summer Michael Jackson died, and Brown saw a clip in which Slash played guitar during a live performance of "Black or White." "I was like, ‘Who the fuck is that? He's so cool,’" Brown remembers. "Then I looked him up and was like, ‘Oh shit, he's Black!’ That was my first time really seeing that representation. It led me to Jimi Hendrix, and then it was, like, over."

Born in Baltimore, Brown was raised on his dad's classic hip-hop and jazz, and his mom's ’90s R&B. He had been playing guitar for just two years when he entered the prestigious Berklee College of Music at 17, an experience he says taught him how not to approach songwriting; he was disinterested in verse-chorus song structure and turned off by the session-musician aspirations of some of their classmates. He recorded a few albums under the monikers Riley With Fire and Mother Marcus, which drew on his love of Prince, but felt he hadn't yet lived enough life to have much to say. "I didn't know how to write music the way that I wanted to," Brown says. "I went to school for music, but I hated it."

At this point, their most prized instrument is a Roland Juno-106 synthesizer they purchased after winning a few thousand dollars off a nominal investment in Dogecoin. He writes most of his songs on guitar or synth first, before putting it all into Ableton for drums and harmonies. It's how they composed a song like "Daddy," about not measuring up to a girlfriend's sugar daddy, that opens with him singing wistfully into the void, or the echoes on "Workers Interlude," a hymn which sounds like multiple Marcuses unionizing on a song about the legacy of slavery.

"It is very easy to sound corny talking about political shit. That's why I thought ‘Daddy’ was cool, because I’m making a capitalist commentary, I guess, but it sounds like a silly thing about sex and relationships—but money is a big part of relationships," they say. "For me, creativity is just taking two things and finding a commonality—breaking them down to their bare essentials." It's not an unusual quality, but the way he approaches it is: the way his music ends up sounding honest and true, filling up a vacancy you might not have realized you had.

At the flea market, Brown eyes a leather jacket painted with the visage of Nipsey Hussle and talks about living in Los Angeles at the time of the rapper's murder in 2019. He moved there on a whim because he’d never left the East Coast—and because he was watching David Lynch's Mulholland Drive almost every day. "I was like, ‘Oh, this looks like a vibe.’"

Brown describes himself as a leftist, and we spend a few minutes chatting about politics—the pitfalls of people of color ascending to power only to end up subjugating other people of color, the 2008 financial crisis, boomers selling out to Wall Street in the ’80s, the CIA infiltrating Latin America—before we are distracted by a sick, wildly patterned button-down shirt. Brown considers it, discovers its $85 price tag, and hangs it back on the rack.

The heady conversation turns to Black capitalists, The New Jim Crow, and what a Jay-Z socialist rap would be like, but Brown makes sure to note, "I talk like this, but I also love bullshit." He invokes his favorite professor at Berklee, Larry Watson, who he cites as helping him think in a more radical way. "He would say that music for music's sake is nothing more than deodorized horseshit. He wanted us all to just make ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,’" Brown recalls, citing Sam Cooke's civil rights era touchstone. "I like that as a chamber, but it's not all I wanna put my energy into. I never wanna be typecast as one thing, I always want to be able to be flexible." He then adds, laughing, "But also I do want to focus, at some point."