How Medium Build beat the system

He’s on a tour of Europe supporting the latest Medium Build record, Country, and its sister EP, Marietta, and the days are blurring together. When we finally get the chance to talk, he’s on a quick break at a rest stop along the highway, where it’s seemingly just snowed overnight. He props his camera up on a ledge and lights a well-deserved cigarette.

“Okay, I just looked it up,” he says, excited. “I’m in a place called Münchberg. I mean, look at that! It’s the most beautiful Burger King you’ve ever seen.” He points to a pristine outlet of the famous American chain right behind him. “Dude, they actually do Burger King so crazy over here. Like, they do it better. The UK and Europe fucks with Burger King.”

At the time of our meeting, Carpenter is just over a week away from closing out the busiest year of his career. Long a musician by trade, Carpenter became a mainstay of the Anchorage local scene and the alternative indie bubble, self-releasing a series of excellent and progressively folk-fringed, daring records until getting picked up by slowplay / Island Records in 2023. Now finishing out his push supporting Country, he’s mostly just ready to rest.

“I haven’t been to Anchorage since September, which means I haven’t seen my dogs since September,” he tells me. “We have three more shows, and then we’re going to have a little party at our last day in Paris … I’ll make it home for Christmas, which will be awesome.”

These days, though, even home comes with a little bit of work. It’s only natural. Carpenter is in one of those growing pain moments of life, shedding what was to assume a newer, bigger form. “It’s like, you spend eight years being a towny nobody, and then all of a sudden everyone thinks you’re cool and important,” he says of his trips back to Anchorage now. Carpenter is sort of teasing when he says this, of course, but he’s also not. Encased in every jester-like quip he makes is, you can tell, an experience and a feeling that runs far closer to his chest. Both in music and in life, his ability to balance the lighthearted with the deep, the funny with the raw, and the mundane with the existential, is what makes Carpenter and his project so enticing.

Born and raised in Georgia, Carpenter first escaped to Alaska to “get away from the south.” His father was a missionary who hadn’t grown up with much, and he wanted his family exposed to “good” neighborhoods that he himself hadn’t had access to. “My dad was renting on the edge of town. He wanted to be exposed to guys he thought would, like, elevate us, but really, I think it just gave my brother and I this eternal chip on our shoulder,” he laughs. “We always felt like we were schmucks in our hand-me-down clothes next to these rich kids with polos and new cars.”

Faith, above almost all else, was central to Carpenter’s childhood. His community, of course, was steeped in the church. He staffed camps and classes, and he first played music in worship groups and choirs. But the private tenets of his belief system went even beyond those moderate and common cultural permeations. “There’s so many Christians that grew up Catholic or even Baptist that just check in on Sunday, say big-ups to the big man, and put it away,” Carpenter tells me. “But for me, it was 24/7. Worship music was on the radio. Mom was always reading the bible and praying. It was just so more in the DNA.”

In his older brother, Carpenter saw an alternative example. A musical family by nature – his dad sang, his mother played piano – his brother eventually got involved in his high school theatre scene. This was his eventual gateway. “When I was, like, 12, I was going to his plays and I was exposed to queer people that did theatre. I was like, ‘Oh my God, what is this?!’ Everyone’s singing and everyone’s fucking weird and is allowed to dress however they want,” Carpenter remembers. “They played me cool music. They showed me The Beatles. I was a singing kid, I was into R&B and Usher. But when I got exposed to my brother’s music and drug music and party kid music, I was like, ‘Oh, okay, there’s a new layer of it.’”

When Carpenter’s brother left the church and moved to Alaska, he followed shortly thereafter. “When my brother left the church, my mom and dad would be in the living room on their knees, crying and praying for my brother to come back to the faith. You know, really heavy shit,” he says. His own eventual leaving was eventually essential, he admits. By 18, he felt disillusioned with the pillars his faith and community held up. Why, for example, would families be looked down upon their child was gay or chose not to go to college? Why were the richest families in the church proud to spend their money on mission trips abroad rather than investing in their own communities? Was someone really condemned just because they smoked a cigarette or cursed? “All of a sudden you’re just playing God, and I just wanted nothing to do with it,” Carpenter says of his mindset at the time. The easiest place for him to go, he realised, was north.

Alaska carries with it a lore of its own. A far-flung promontory attached to Canada and a stone’s throw away from Russia, it can’t help but feel a little mysterious and daring. First a military experiment, then a hotspot for enterprising gold miners, now an oil state that simultaneously houses vibrant communities of nature lovers, it’s a place that doesn’t play by the rules. And that’s not to mention the thousands of years of Indigenous tradition the territory is steeped in. Someone who makes the choice to pack up and move there, then, naturally carries a bit of that aura inside themselves as well. This, at least from our conversation, feels true of Carpenter. “Alaska is just so different than the East Coast,” he says. “There’s all this weird mixture, and it’s super diverse. It’s just unlike anything I’d ever experienced.”

His first stint in the state was short but impactful. Immediately, he found his way into the open mic circuit, where he started playing music for crowds on his own and outside of a worship setting. It kickstarted his obsession with songwriting, and, more than anything, gave him a grounded sense of chosen community. “I basically lost my faith and started exploring myself,” he says. “I was just like, ‘Oh, there’s so much world I don’t know.’ I found that if you go to a bar and play music, people just tell you about themselves and you learn so much. Basically, you’re always invited if you have a guitar and can sing.”

Carpenter is one of those people who comes off as thoughtfully and genuinely inquisitive above all else, almost as if he’s looking back on where he’s been not just to understand himself but to understand the world at large. In any room he walks into, it seems, this quality affords him not just respect but kinship and connection.

Though Carpenter has since lived on-and-off in Alaska (he’s currently based in Nashville and once spent a small stretch back in Georgia), he considers it, spiritually, his home base. Moving there was healing, he says: “In big city situations, I’ll just hide. But [in Anchorage] you can’t hide. Everyone knows where you work, everyone knows where you hang, and you are kind of forced to squash beef, which was a healthy thing for me to learn,” he tells me.

About a year after Carpenter’s first trip to Alaska, he was convinced by a friend to move to the Nashville suburbs, where he enrolled in the MTSU songwriting program. While he went to hone his craft and try and make the punk music he was writing at the time better, he realized most of his classmates were in it to become Top 40 songwriters and producers. When that avenue dried up – one of his bandmates at the time got grounded, the other, in proper 21^st century fashion, became a social media manager – he started making the rounds on Nashville’s music row, playing to any and every executive who would hear them.

“These old dudes were just entertaining me,” he says with a soft chuckle. “I was just playing them everything I had. It’d be one of my punk songs, one of my R&B songs, one of my pop songs, one of my rock songs. They were like, ‘Dude, we don’t know what the fuck you do. And you don’t really know what the fuck you do.’”

“I was like, ‘Well, I’m never gonna win this game because I don’t have the right haircut, I don’t have the right clothes, I don’t know how to work the system,’” he says. “I just felt so uneducated and poor and out of water.” In that state of bitterness, he called a friend with a tape machine and just spent a weekend making whatever came to mind. All Carpenter wanted was to make music for fun again and not out of any sense of professional obligation: “I was like, ‘Let me just go see what music is like as a hobby again.’”

In two days, his first project as ‘Medium Build’ – an inside joke in his friend group name poking fun at the way he’d once described a date – was made. He went back to Alaska again, returning to the DIY scene he’d left to pursue his formal training. Bartending for cash, he weaved in and out of house shows and bands. As he says, it was “toxic in the best way.” Everyone knew each other’s exes and business, but everything, in the end, became water under the bridge or a funny story. The scene was just too small to not. In a way, Carpenter found in Anchorage unconditional love and belonging.

Musically, Carpenter was an everything-man during this period. His earliest recordings, released from 2016 – 2020, were an eclectic and addicting blend of alternative indie, R&B, and electronica. He churned out records like it was nothing, trying sounds and styles on for size, developing a knack for fusion that he carries on to this day. “I’m fine to give myself permission to show up inconsistently, sonically. I’m okay with the grab bag sonic palette,” he says. While these days he’s leaning towards acoustic guitars, his original love of R&B will never go away. He still writes to drum machines all the time, for example, and on tour, he uses loops and samples rather than a live drummer.

Playing back his discography chronologically, his evolution and refinement as a musician is satisfyingly clear. His signature strong vocal begins to become more confident, while the drum machine beats he writes to become tighter and polished, culminating ultimately in 2019’s Wild, arguably the last record of the true DIY era of Medium Build.

These grassroots-oriented beginnings are what give Medium Build his edge. He has a certain quality both about him and his art that feels rare in today’s music industry. My own introduction to him was via word-of-mouth, from a friend who’d spent a summer hanging around Alaska and showed up at a bunch of his gigs. So often now, artist discovery happens algorithmically, and while this has democratized access and shaken up the landscape in myriad exciting ways, there’s still something special about an act like Medium Build that feels nurtured by offline community, from the ground up.

In 2020, he split with his longtime collaborator over a decision to sign Medium Build to a management company. In Anchorage fashion, he insists there’s no bad blood now, though he acknowledges at the time egos and stubbornness clouded over him. But with the project moving in a new direction, Medium Build began to level up. Carpenter started being more intentional about releases, shelling out singles slowly rather than in whole-album batches. He took time to curate meaningful artwork, honing his messages into a cohesive world.

“2020 to 2022 was, like, so much pain of learning the industry,” he says. “But now, like ast night, playing a sold-out crowd in Berlin of people singing along, it hits me. I’m like, ‘I cannot believe this is real.’”

Carpenter’s rise to the top of the indie pile has happened both slowly and all at once. He’s a classic case of the 10-year overnight success, years in which he was afforded the time to get to know himself. The culmination of those experiences was this year’s Country, Medium Build’s major label debut. Inspired both by country icons like James Taylor, the album was Carpenter’s most stripped back, most introspective work to date. Dripping in lapsteels and folksy picking, Country allowed Carpenter to tap into his yearning side, a place he’d been previously too nervous to go.

As he toured and promoted the record, his label came knocking for a deluxe edition, an industry standard of sorts that helps generate a second wave of interest for a big project. Carpenter – always true to his own vision – knew this would be a disservice both to his story and to his audience. Instead, he wanted to create something new. Enter Marietta.

Named after his hometown, Marietta was both an extension of the Country story and a bridge to the next. Country painted the picture of Carpenter’s life in broad strokes, discussing his family, his sexuality, and his process of figuring himself out. Marietta then came along to fill in the details. The new EP focuses mostly on the story of his childhood, a chapter he says he had to address to finally find peace and healing.

“Country was a lot of me getting in touch with my dad and where he came from and finding that empathy for him, because he was always this gray cloud over my head,” Carpenter says. “I wanted to give that chapter a close … [On Marietta] we go into the fine details, the cells, and find out where my pain started from.”

On Marietta, Carpenter writes the story of his own life and his family’s. The cover art, for example, is taken in front of the Sears his father worked in when he hit financial hardships. “John & Lydia” describes almost word for word the arc of his upbringing. And on standout track, “Yoke,” Carpenter brings on Julien Baker to flesh out the grieving process that was his experience leaving the church he grew up in while still trying to hold on to threads of his faith. The point of it all, ultimately, was to “not hide from himself.”

As with the album cover, all the content for the project was shot in the Georgia neighbourhood he grew up in. “All the visuals were at places that were important to me or part of my story,” he explains. “It was weird. It was a heavy day. I don’t go back very often.”

Moving away and moving on can often create a splitting of the self. Going back to one you wanted to leave behind – as Carpenter did – can be jarring, and part of the work of Marietta was facing that self so it could coexist with the new life he had created and loved.

“It also felt like giving [my parents] empathy instead of just demonizing them for bringing me to church,” he says. “They also had to work their ass off for me so I could have the most benign, middle-class upbringing.”

Carpenter shares these details of his life story without a hint of malice and without a grudge, even if he acknowledges the hardship that period of finding himself may have brought. He comes off an earnest open book, a quality that makes him both so easy to talk to and so easy to be compelled by. The best part of it all is that this is the only way Carpenter would ever even want to operate. As he says: “I’m just trying to tear down the barriers so I can just get shit out.”

“I’m proud of how we’ve got it,” he says of his evolution so far. “I think if you would have told me when I was 20 and really started trying that, ‘Yo, it’s not going to happen until you’re in your 30s.’ I probably would have cried and quit; I don’t know. I’m glad I didn’t.”