B-Side Guys

There’s something perfectly imperfect about recording an album one day at a time, letting the tape heads capture each moment of vulnerability exactly as it emerges. On “to be a man,” Martin Luke Brown transforms this technical constraint into emotional truthfulness, creating a portrait of masculine fragility that feels as raw as a live nerve.

The track’s deliberately lo-fi production, crafted with producer Matt Zara using vintage microphones and tape machines, creates an intimate space where Brown’s confessions feel like late-night whispers. Static crackles and analog warmth wrap around his vocals like a protective blanket as he navigates through personal loss and societal expectations: “I had a friend, now I don’t, he was 29 / He didn’t know how to be or how to live this life.”

Brown’s experience as part of the flamboyant indie collective FIZZ seems to have granted him the freedom to explore masculinity’s quieter corners. The arrangement strips away pretense – there’s no muscular instrumentation or production flourishes to hide behind. Instead, the focus remains on his unflinching examination of male vulnerability, particularly poignant in lines like “buy a house, wage a war, anything to prove / that you are worthy of unconditional love.”

As a preview of his upcoming album “man oh man!” (due February 21st via AMK), this single suggests a project that treats contemporary masculinity not as a thesis statement but as a series of questions. The repeated plea “won’t someone hold my hand” lands with particular weight, challenging the notion that male strength means refusing to ask for help.

Each track on the album was captured in a single day, and “to be a man” benefits from this immediacy. Brown’s vocal delivery maintains the hesitancy of someone working through thoughts in real-time, particularly when addressing statistics about male mental health with the devastating observation “Yeah we’ve all read the stats / and we can do the math.” It’s a reminder that behind every data point lies a human story, often left untold.