Nourished by Time isn’t your everyday R&B singer
Sophomore slumping has plenty of root causes, but the pop music proverb we often use to explain that unlucky dip feels wrong: You have your entire life to make your first record and only a year or two to make your second. Not really. Has anyone ever successfully squeezed the entirety of their existence into a debut album? With his new sophomore opus, “The Passionate Ones,” it’s clear that Nourished by Time — the nom-du-R&B of Baltimore singer-songwriter Marcus Brown — still has plenty of life stashed away in the pockets of his work pants.
This is an album filled with strangely exhilarating, broad-minded songs about love, longing, hard times and end times — all sung in a voice that feels wide enough to express Brown’s multitudes. As a singer, he has a thing for low tones and slack elocution, frequently channeling Luther Vandross doing his opening verse warm-ups or Jodeci in growly reverie. But then, instead of blasting off toward the falsetto zone like nearly all of his R&B forebears, Brown stays put. He’s more interested in exploring the topography than kissing the clouds. You can hear it best during “When the War is Over,” a lover’s ballad planted at the bottom of his throat: “I wanna see you like a flower does, gotta get it down low in the mud,” he sings, turning the word “mud” into something loose enough for you to slip on.
He’s a fantastic writer, but he’s never precious about it, letting his voice lurch and wobble through the most audacious declarations on his lyric sheet. “If I’m gonna go insane at least I’m loved by you,” he bellows during the careening hook of “Max Potential,” one of many tracks on “The Passionate Ones” that surges with enough pomp and madness to sound like it might share DNA with Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times.” The spectacular ambiguity in Brown’s lyrics can evoke a Princely freakiness, too, like during the queasy funk of “Automatic Love” when Brown seemingly uses female pronouns to describe a particular aspect of his anatomy.
Which is all to say that Nourished by Time wants us to feel something. Anything. Maybe everything. “The Passionate Ones” has the cold-eyed prescience to imagine the war machine touching down in a Baltimore neighborhood (“If you can bomb Palestine, you can bomb Mondawmin,” Brown sings on “Baby Baby”) and the goofing self-awareness required to understand that falling in love can make us stupid. (Take a stroll with the besotted “Idiot in the Park.”) If all of that feels strange to you, congratulations on being reintroduced to your nerve endings.
“We don’t have to be so average,” Brown sings during “It’s Time,” delivering one of the most necessary lyrics of the numb and fearful era we’re now living in. “And I say that with love.”
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Nourished By Time’s “The Passionate Ones Tour”
With Zsela
When: 8 p.m. Monday, Sept. 22
Where: Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago, (773) 525-2501
Tickets: Start at $31 at lh-st.com/shows/09-22-2025-nourished-by-time/