"Toxic Love"
Marcellus The Singer New Generation Southern Soul
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February 16, 2025:
Like Bob Dylan & The Band's "Basement Tapes," released without fanfare from a home recording studio in Woodstock, New York in the early 70's, Marcellus The Singer put out a whimsical and little noticed project on YouTube in 2024 called Mixtape 90's Edition, lavishing "cover" love on classics from the era that had apparently inspired his own oeuvre. Later in the year one of them, "It's A Thin Line (Between Love And Hate)," took on a life of its own, charting on many deejay charts and impressing fans with its obvious antecedents to "Toxic Love".
--Daddy B. Nice
About Marcellus The Singer New Generation Southern Soul
Marcellus The Singer is the performing name of Amite, Louisiana native Terence Daniels Jr. Marcellus broke into the southern soul market in 2021 with the six-song EP Heart & Soul. He'd experimented with R&B music as early as 2019 with the single "Wave". However, Heart & Soul, showcasing tracks like "Do It Right" and "Love Me Right," was the first collection to establish Marcellus as a balladeer primed for commercial appeal with a unique and tender yet swinging style. Between 2021 and 2023 the singer/songwriter went to serious work, publishing a series of elite singles that would culminate in the album Music Therapy. (Scroll down to Tidbits #1 for Daddy B. Nice's New Album Alert.) Both the individually-released songs and the album elicited a sensational response from the southern soul audience. Heavyweight tracks like "Toxic Love" and "The Letter "each amassed twenty million streams on YouTube. "Toxic Love" in particular became the artist's signature song, and the strength of the album led to lucrative bookings and immediate success on the southern soul touring circuit.
In 2024 Marcellus returned to the studio for the EP Calling All Crack Babies, a five-track set highlighted by the single "Watch What You Doing," the extended, life-story ballad "Until We Meet" and the slow jam "You Baby," a duet with fellow rising southern soul star Cecily Wilborn. Daddy B. Nice proclaimed the EP even better than MUSIC THERAPY, representing a "huge leap forward in musical maturity". Scroll down to Tidbits #2 for the 4-star review.
Tidbits
Louisiana native Marcellus The Singer’s album debut features a full-fledged balladeer with a style more urban than southern soul. Recently, however, his single “Toxic Love” has crossed over into southern soul, and rightfully so. "Toxic Love" is as good as it gets for a southern soul ballad. You know it within the first sixteen bars, and it sounds better now than it did a year ago. The moniker "the singer" is apt. Marcellus kills the vocal, exhibiting both heart and technique.
As for the album as a whole, it's less interesting from a southern soul perspective, tailored for mainstream R&B. But there are exceptions---the puzzling reggae track "Don't Rush" and the winsome zydeco/barbershop-blended "Trailride Shawty".
But the real proof that he could do well in the southern soul genre (and that he's beginning to smell the money and the roses) came earlier this year with the arrival of Marcellus' new single "Shot Of Moonshine"---also from MUSIC THERAPY---which charted in January on Daddy B. Nice's Top Ten Southern Soul Singles. It's a worthy follow-up to "Toxic Love".
Listen to all the tracks from Marcellus The Singer's MUSIC THERAPY album on YouTube.
Buy Marcellus The Singer's debut album MUSIC THERAPY at Apple.
If you troll YouTube for music videos you've no doubt come across one of the most bizarre pieces of cover art in recent memory: a chains, bracelets and ring-wearing two-year-old in a white cowboy hat and sneakers sitting in a pile of cash with a landline phone to his ear wheeling and dealing like a creepy, calculating Chucky doll. The title is also disturbing. Calling All Crack Babies. And yet the music within this new EP from the gifted young recording artist Marcellus The Singer belies the packaging, being gracious, gentle and uplifting throughout.
Pristine songwriting, vocalizing and production are on full display in "You Baby" (#3 February DBN's Top 10), a duet with Cecily Wilborn, who has attracted her own significant fanbase with the southern soul anthem "Southern Man" (Best Collaboration of 2023 with West Love) and more recently her gutsy foray into country with #1 single "Red Cup Blues" (March). When Wilborn enters mid-way through "You Baby" with---
1. "Until We Meet Again"-----Marcellus The Singer
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Honorary "B" Side
"The Letter"
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