Article Contributed by jbleicher.com
Published on 2026-04-23
Martin Luther McCoy has spent decades building a body of work that resists easy categorization. A singer, songwriter, guitarist, actor, producer, and multidisciplinary artist, McCoy has moved between worlds with unusual fluency - touring with The Roots, collaborating with artists including Erykah Badu and Saul Williams, appearing in Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, taking on the role of Jojo in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, performing with SFJAZZ Collective, and co-founding Moon Medicin, a multidisciplinary performance project that blends music, visual art, and ritual.
Now, McCoy returns with Welcome Back Love, his first full-length album in 14 years, due out Friday, July 17th. Alongside the announcement, he has released the official video for the album’s lead single, “Peace of Mind,” a quietly powerful song about endurance, recalibration, and holding onto purpose while life unfolds on its own terms
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“Peace of Mind,” which won the 2025 Gospel Choice Music Award in the Gospel Afrobeats category, serves as a fitting entry point into the larger arc of the album. It grew out of what McCoy describes as the psychic strain of waiting, pivoting, and trying to keep faith through uncertainty. The new video underscores that emotional terrain, bringing the song’s sense of perseverance and inner stillness into sharp visual focus.
If Welcome Back Love feels lived-in, it is because it is.
The album arrives after years shaped by marriage, loss, responsibility, and time. It carries the weight of a long independent path - one defined by total commitment, but also by the burden of having to build and sustain so much on his own. For McCoy, that meant writing, producing, shaping, releasing, and carrying the full weight of the work himself. That independence created freedom, but it also made the road longer, heavier, and at times isolating. The work never stopped. It simply unfolded on its own terms.
And yet Welcome Back Love does not dwell in exhaustion. It reaches for something steadier
Martin Luther McCoy’s first memory of sound is not a record, or a stage, or even a song with words. It is his grandmother, Ruby Mae Watkins, holding him against her chest and humming.
He still describes that sound in physical terms: deep, rich, profound, thick as molasses. Ruby Mae was a revered singer in Marshall, Texas, called upon for funerals, weddings, graduations, moments of mourning and celebration alike. She was, in his words, “the voice of Marshall, Texas,” a woman whose singing belonged to the life of the community. That gift moved through the family - into Martin’s father, Harold, into his siblings, and eventually into him - long before he had any language for what he might do with it.
That idea - sound as something lived, shared, and carried - took hold early.
Born in San Francisco and raised in the Lakeview-Ingleside area, with Bayview-Hunters Point shaping his understanding of community and culture, McCoy came up in a distinctly Bay Area mix of church, family, and musical lineage stretching from Sly Stone to the city’s rap pioneers. His older brother helped shape his ear, while his own instincts pushed him further. By five, he was writing songs; by his teens, he could build them from the inside out - verses, harmonies, arrangements - all by ear, without formal training.
The guitar became central to that process, even as it stood outside the accepted codes of his environment. Inspired by Prince, McCoy used it as a tool to translate the fully formed music he heard in his head, building his own language rather than waiting for permission.
That instinct has defined his path. After studying media communications, entertainment law, and advertising at Morehouse College, he moved through music, production, fashion, and independent entrepreneurship, founding Beyond Entertainment in the 1990s, which later evolved into Rebel Soul Records and a broader philosophy he calls Rebel Soul Music. Drawing from gospel, soul, funk, rock, hip-hop, and folk, his work resists categorization, channeling the full inheritance of Black American music through a singular voice and vision
Alongside the music, McCoy’s creative practice extends into visual and physical forms - painting, clothing, masks, and instrument design - an extension of the same impulse to build rather than wait. As he has said, “I didn’t have room enough to put art on my walls so I put it on my clothes.” His art is lived in, worn, and carried, part of a larger vision that makes him difficult to reduce to any single lane.
For all its personal weight, Welcome Back Love also feels like an opening - a return to the record business, to his audience, and to a mode of expression he believes the culture has drifted from. Taken together, the songs reflect his long-held belief in music’s ability to heal, challenge, and reconnect.
For Martin Luther McCoy, that has always been the work.
Welcome Back Love finds him stepping forward with renewed intention - presenting his voice, his history, and his vision with unusual clarity. After decades of building, surviving, searching, and recommitting, he remains devoted to the same core idea that first shaped him:
sound as communion,
sound as medicine,
sound as a way through.
Welcome Back Love arrives July 17th via Rebel Soul Records.
Welcome Back Love by Martin Luther McCoy
1. Reimagine The World
2. It’s Going Down Tonight
3. Now
4. Pedal To The Metal
5. Welcome Back Love (feat. Stic of Dead Prez)
6. Fear Or Faith
7. Better Than Alright
8. I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues
9. Peace of Mind
10. Wait It Out
11. Turning 21
12. Hit Parade
13. Widowmaker
14. Warmth Of Other Suns
15. Black Sugar
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