Interview by Paul Salfen, Text by Christine Thompson for AMFM Magazine
In a warm and wide-ranging conversation with AMFM Magazine’s Paul Salfen, Martin Luther McCoy opens up about the long, intentional road to his first full-length album in 14 years. Welcome Back Love arrives July 17th via Rebel Soul Records, and it feels like both a personal homecoming and a much-needed return to music that prioritizes depth, groove, and emotional truth. The San Francisco-based singer, songwriter, guitarist, actor, and multidisciplinary artist has spent decades moving between worlds — touring with The Roots, playing Jojo in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, collaborating with Erykah Badu and Saul Williams, and building his own Rebel Soul philosophy through music, visual art, clothing, and instrument design. Now he’s back with 15 tracks that carry the weight of time, loss, marriage, responsibility, and creative survival while still making you want to move.
McCoy has never been in a hurry to release volume for volume’s sake. “I’ve written 3 or 4 albums worth of material, at least,” he tells Salfen. “But it’s not about the volume. For me. It’s more about… That one song that does something that… You never forget. So if I… I got 15 chances at being, you know, one of those on this album.” Material written before and after 2020 kept growing as he tried to “synthesize the gravity of what’s happening in the world and in my life and in the neighborhood.” A project that was essentially ready two years ago simply didn’t have its title song yet. That changed when he reached out to his friend Stic from Dead Prez, who delivered a monster verse on the title track “Welcome Back Love.” The album also recovers “Pedal To The Metal” from an old hard drive everyone thought was lost forever.
One song in particular carries extra light and warmth. “Better Than Alright” was written while McCoy was falling in love with his wife. He remembers the exact moment she stepped out of the bathroom and he said, almost without thinking, “that’s all right.” She answered, “it’s just all right.” Guitar in hand, he turned the exchange into something richer: “It’s better than all right.” The lyrics capture that feeling of stepping outside yourself and realizing what’s in front of you is something special. “She comes knifin’ through my gloom. She better than all right… She don’t know what this is doing to me. I’m letting go of everything that don’t add up to you being with me, and that’s better than all, right?” It’s folk-ish and soulful, played on electric guitar, and it feels like a blanket.
McCoy’s Texas roots run straight through the music. “In the great state of Texas,” he says proudly during the interview. “My father is from Marshall and my mother is from Galveston. Yeah, and she grew up in Palestine, and Port Arthur, and she was born in a small town not too far from Dallas. So Texas is all in the McAllister clan. Shout out to the McAllisters.” That lineage, including a grandmother whose singing was known as “the voice of Marshall, Texas,” gave him melody and harmony long before he regularly held a guitar. He didn’t get serious with the instrument until his 20s, but by then he already carried the music inside him — learning Beatles chord changes, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Bob Marley by ear. Today he plays an American Stratocaster in Olympic white with a Jimi Hendrix vibe that “feels good… plays wonderfully and it’s got that tone, it’s got that chime that the Stratocaster bridges are famous for.”
The path to bigger stages often came down to being willing to jump in without knowing exactly how it would land. McCoy recounts the unexpected phone call that led to auditioning for The Roots and the last-minute audition before a flight that landed him the role in Across the Universe. Both were “white knuckle” moments he approached with the same attitude: show up, play along, and trust you can recover if something goes sideways. That same fearless preparation shows up in his advice to younger artists. “Preparation is huge. But before you can prepare, you need to have a vision for what it is you think is you, what it is you think you can make a contribution to. How you can be recalled, you know, remembered in the bigger sphere of whatever’s going on… Be fearless enough to go through whatever it is you gotta go through to get it.”
Faith and belief systems are never far from the conversation. McCoy speaks of prayer as something already sent before we recognize it as the present, and of the subconscious ways we fish for the connections and opportunities that answer our deepest longings. He compares the creative and spiritual journey to double dutch: you’re going to get hit a few times trying to jump in, but drive and desire eventually get your legs and timing right until you’re inside the ropes doing 360s. Welcome Back Love reflects that steadiness. “It’s about me welcoming myself back into the business of music,” he explains, while the broader theme reaches toward love for family, community, and humanity itself — the kind of love that feels increasingly rare in a culture of constant distraction and unwellness. “Welcome back to something simple, you know?”
The album opens with lead single “Peace of Mind,” which recently won the 2025 Gospel Choice Music Award in the Gospel Afrobeats category. Other standouts include “Reimagine The World,” “Fear Or Faith,” “Wait It Out,” “Warmth Of Other Suns,” and the title track featuring Stic of Dead Prez. McCoy is already looking ahead to acoustic versions and raw new material, including songs with “serious meditative kind of power.” Fans on the East Coast can catch him soon: a screening of Across the Universe on Martha’s Vineyard July 22nd followed by a live performance there on July 29th.
Martin Luther McCoy has spent his life treating sound as communion, medicine, and a way through. With Welcome Back Love he steps forward with unusual clarity — guitar in hand, Texas in his bones, love in the center, and a body of work that reminds us why we keep listening.
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