Martin Luther McCoy has never done things the way you’d expect. He grew up in San Francisco absorbing church, soul, funk, and Bay Area street culture simultaneously, built his musical vocabulary entirely by ear, and spent the decades that followed moving between worlds most artists treat as separate careers — touring with The Roots, playing Jojo in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, performing with SFJAZZ Collective, appearing in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, co-founding the multidisciplinary performance project Moon Medicin. He also paints, designs clothing, builds masks, and designs instruments. As he once put it: “I didn’t have room enough to put art on my walls so I put it on my clothes.”

Now, fourteen years after his last full-length album, he’s back with Welcome Back Love, out July 17th on Rebel Soul Records. Fifteen tracks spanning gospel, soul, funk, rock, folk, and hip-hop, featuring Stic of Dead Prez on the title track and a lead single, “Peace of Mind,” that won the 2025 Gospel Choice Music Award in the Gospel Afrobeats category. The album was built the way everything in McCoy’s life gets built — independently, on his own terms, over a long time, and with no interest in waiting for permission from anyone. We sat down with him to find out what fourteen years actually looks like from the inside.

Martin, thanks for making time. Ruby Mae, your grandmother, was the voice the whole community of Marshall, Texas reached for when something important happened. Funerals, weddings, graduations. That kind of role doesn’t just pass down genetically. When did you first understand that what she carried was now yours to carry?

When my father, later in his years, reminded me about the power of the gift. For years people and organizations had inquired about me singing the star spangled banner. I don’t perform this piece of music often. It was the SF Giants Baseball team in this particular instance. Just so my father could hear and see me on that grand of a platform I would eventually say yes to the offer but demand payment in return.

You see, carrying the gift doesn’t make things alright or good or better just on it’s face. You also carry the responsibility to deliver and elicit and invoke. He told me that people would come to me with a need of my gift and that I should highly consider the offer an honor and to make the best decision when the time came. Mind you, he started subbing for his mother around the age of 10 when she was not feeling her best. He had accepted the calling at a very early age.

You’ve described her humming as something felt before it was heard — deep, physical, thick. By five years old you were already writing songs. Do you think you were trying to recreate that feeling, or get away from it?

I was alive with clarity and determination by the age of five. My mother did a wonderful job of protecting me and caring for my well being. So much so that I fought and sought out mischief because she was so caring and did her best to shield me from the world. My older brother was about that street life and I wanted in. When I discovered who I was, I went for it. Pen in hand with a full bodied imagination even if I only knew a slight bit of confirmed information at that tender age.

I didn’t seek anything that my grandmothers hum induced. I sought everything outside of the house I get myself involved in. Not so much drugs or being a knuckle head but being my own man, my own boss, entrepreneurial pursuits and bmx riding and sports of all kinds and art and music styles and fashion and the like. Not alcohol or anything self destructive but I did have a bit of a weed habit by the age of 7.

Fourteen years between albums. You were writing, producing, building Rebel Soul Records, carrying the full weight of everything independently. At what point during those fourteen years did it stop feeling like freedom and start feeling like something else?

It was laborious from the start. We knew, my business partner Jeff Alston and I, that without proper funding runways to establish an underground railroad if you will, we would have to move much slower to gain altitude. So nothing changed in that regard. It also happened that napster and digital sharing killed a lot of financial methods many artists abided by to sell music and make money and when that changed I just fell back to wait it out and re design how we would move forward. We tried to work with labels a few times but they never ended up fulfilling their end of the agreements.

“Peace of Mind” won a Gospel Afrobeats award in 2025. How did a song about inner stillness and endurance end up in that specific sonic territory?

I didn’t start out with any particular mission. I just touch instruments and make musical phrases and then go about my normal day and in this instance I was at Yale Rep working on a play and where I was living was like a dorm / hotel styled building. The girls in the room adjacent, who made all kinds of noise all day had the nerve to ask me to turn my music down when I was making the beat and the mantra bout needing peace of mind (from that particular situation) went into my head and came out in a melody and then the first verse. But it took years for the second stanza and second verse to materialize. I don’t force it. It comes when it’s supposed to.

You studied entertainment law at Morehouse and then spent decades navigating the industry without a major label. Most independent artists say the system is broken. You actually understand how it works from a legal standpoint. Does that knowledge make it easier to survive, or harder, because you can see exactly where the trap is before you step in it?

Nothing is too hard nor too easy. It really takes alliances and timing and tons of good luck. Some people have enough infrastructure to manufacture good luck. Others of us are not so fortunate. Making the right connections and keeping egos in check is also a life course of how to navigate any industry. The laws and the focus of how money is generated in music is a life class we can all brush up on from time to time as trends change. I’m forever a student of the game. “you gotta know when to hold em, fold em or just walk away”.

Prince was the reason you picked up guitar, to translate music already fully formed in your head. Has that ever created friction in the studio with musicians who came to their instruments the conventional way?

People tolerate the person paying the bills.

Across the Universe, SFJAZZ Collective, Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, Moon Medicin — what does moving across all those worlds give you that committing to one lane never could?

I am still that five year old who sought the world. I wanted to know and to contribute. By participating, I could actually then transform that information into my own creation like a play I am writing or a movie script or a way to direct attention cinematically… after having been on set as a production assistant back at Morehouse or as a leading actor for a major motion picture, I have been blessed with these trials by fire and like pure gold have been purified by the flame.

The album is called Welcome Back Love. That title implies love left — or you did. The record covers marriage, loss, responsibility, years of carrying everything alone. What specifically had to change in your life before this album was possible, not the music, but you personally?

I have to have a purpose to create. I don’t drop songs everyday or week or month like other creators. When purpose finds me, I respond. Had it not been for the pandemic I would have had two projects out by now but such is life. I would also say that this project, title and body of work wouldn’t be the same had events of the world not unfolded in the way that they did. I am back to my purpose as a creator. I never left it but I have pursued other projects but more importantly, being an artist who was “made by vinyl records”, I am only returning the honor that helped shape and form my perspective about music, production, analog vs digital or better yet the value and power in hybrid production and then being solid enough in my own creative path to tell the truth as I have come to understand it. Whatever that truth maybe, it’s in the music, the writing and the conversation we hope this double LP will generate.

You paint, design clothing, build masks, design instruments. “I didn’t have room enough to put art on my walls so I put it on my clothes.” When you’re deep inside a visual project, does it change anything about how you hear music — or do those two parts of you not talk to each other?

They don’t talk at all but they will inform, not each other as communicating disciplines but as chambers in the same body or on the same campus that are accessed randomly or when my inner child chooses that door. I don’t see a visual idea when I’m producing a beat or writing a guitar riff and or vice versa. I will put on some music like Ravel or Miles Davis or Fela Kuti or Robert Nesta Marley or Prince Rogers Nelson or Willie Nelson or Neil Young.. something to get me into a space that is drift inducing. Once I’m on the wave, usually a preroll is somewhere close by but not so much as of late, I graciously accept the ride.

The album closes with “Black Sugar.” That’s the last word on a record fourteen years in the making. What’s in that song that made it the right ending?

Initially it was the beginning of the record. A sequencing journey is one of the last stages of completing the assignment of producing a body of work. I can’t force the song ordering. It has to present itself from experimentation and many many hours of listening particularly while driving. That’s when the subconscious instructions land for me. By being focused on the road in a very present way, my inner ears can hear when or what is wrong with the music or the song order or the prose in a verse or the chord progressions in a song. It’s all a process and I’m blessed to be able to borrow from the omniverse, be channeled to communicate and talented enough to complete the assignments.

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