On the The Passionate Ones, his second album as Nourished by Time, Baltimore native Marcus Brown plumbs the ways that class and labor become inseparable from creativity. Brown slides in across the booth from me holding a beer, asserting that it takes more than moving to a new city to stoke one’s creative fire. I wasn’t really expecting anyone to hear it, and I was kind of just writing music,” Brown says. But there’s also the work your job doesn’t want you to do, the work that sets you free — and that’s creative work.” These days, creative work is his full-time job, and his move to New York was prompted by a desire to follow the muse. “By the end of it, I realized: As long as I’m myself, I’m Black,” he explains.