Zoe Nicholson is the Senior Features Editor for The Post and Courier and Free Times. She is an SC native and USC alumna who previously covered higher education, local government, business and education in the South.

When Marshall Brown wrote the songs that would eventually make up his September EP "Nesting," he was "a (expletive) mess." A long-term relationship had crumbled during the pandemic. His heart was broken. Mended. Shattered again.

The first draft of "Nesting" reflected that tumultuous phase in Brown's creative and personal life. The songs came easily, but they came bitter.

"It was just coming out of me like sweat," he said.

He put the songs aside and focused on himself. He learned about his anxious attachment style in relationships and realized his party-lover reputation was just a way to numb the pain and feelings he'd long ignored. His inner-healing led him to a new relationship.

Then, Brown came back to "Nesting." More than a year had passed since he wrote those first drafts.

And though his healing wasn't complete, enough time had passed that he approached "Nesting" completely differently.

"When I started working on these songs again, (I) really started building the recordings and completely recontextualized those songs," Brown said.

It led him to a place, musically and personally, he'd never been before. And it shows on "Nesting," which is streaming on all major music platforms and follows his lauded album, "Ay Es Em Ar."

And from his newfound higher ground, Brown's music broke open.

On the record's opening track, "Peace of Mine," Brown leans into this evolution. What begins as a song about distress for a family member becomes a lover's lament on the second verse. But even through the raw pain of the track's lyrics, Brown allows himself a moment of clarity: "Wanna let the sun have a break and let my spirit shine."

The tune features Brown's signature layered harmonies, and his production turns what could be a melodramatic lamentation into an ambient tune that's just as serious as it is fun. That's a theme Brown continues throughout the EP.

Another song, "This Second Bird," is a parody he wrote of one of his earliest tracks, "First Bird." He added a riff emulating the white-throated sparrow's call to the track. It's his girlfriend's favorite bird.

"It just personalized it so much more," he said. "And it was a very healthy process for me to go through, finishing up this EP."

Brown works through some of that on "Sad Pianos: Spirits in the Soundboard." He found the piano melody at his girlfriend's house during some "touch and go times," lending a haunting, hesitant melody that creeps into techno-gothic territory by the end of the instrumental track. The tune was the last song put on the EP, and one Brown wrote during his "Nesting" revisit. It was written for the woman he's with now, as opposed to the other tracks, which were written about an ex.

"And so it was really meaningful for me to throw ('Sad Pianos') on there with these other songs with these lyrics I'd written before," Brown said. "But now, when I heard the lyrics, they felt like they were about her."

While Brown largely wrote, produced and recorded the EP on his own, he did work closely with Dylan Dickerson, the frontman of Dear Blanca and MIDS, and the owner of Comfort Monk, under which "Nesting" was released. The two also collaborate on a project called Shows, along with Brett Nash from Charleston.

"There's tons and tons of great music in South Carolina, but the specific kind of style that he's sort of developed over the years feels pretty uniquely Marshall," Dickerson told Free Times.

The ghostly chorus on "Nesting" is a collection of Brown's past selves, his current self and maybe his future self, too.

For Dickerson, it's evident of Brown's diverse production styles and his desire to keep pushing himself artistically.

"It's very immersive," Dickerson said of the EP. "There's these moments throughout the record that are almost ambient, synth-ey, sort of ethereal things. And I feel like they're timed perfectly throughout the record."

And just because he's reached a new level of maturity -- in both his music and personal life -- Brown isn't resting on any laurels. He's already writing his next record.

Stream "Nesting" on Spotify, Bandcamp and Apple Music. For more information, visit marshallbrownmusic.com