– Ella DeYoung, Staff Writer
Nicholas Carpenter, most notably known as Medium Build, is an American singer-songwriter from Atlanta, Georgia. Carpenter personally calls his music “three-chord bummer country tunes.” He has released five studio albums, including his most recent, King of Having Fun, and is currently signed to Slowplay and Island Records.
Who is Medium Build?
Growing up in Georgia, Carpenter fell in love with music while playing in the church. At the age of 21, he made the move from Atlanta to Nashville to study songwriting, not at Belmont, but at Middle Tennessee State University. There, he had the ability to intern for Disney Publishing and began writing songs for his indie rock band Little Moses. This was the first indie rock band that he fronted. It was a part of the underground indie music scene in Nashville at the time, and overlapped with Julian Baker’s pre-fame projects, with her band, the Star Killers. They creatively collaborated on a few projects together, but eventually just split ways. In 2016, he made the jump to moving to Alaska and began performing as Medium Build.
Career
Carpenter released his debut album, Falling Apart, as Medium Build in 2016. He followed up that release with Softboy and then Roughboy that were both released in 2018, slowly but surely Carpenter started receiving praise in the indie scene once again and released his fourth album, Wild, in 2019. By 2022, he was performing with Nashville local, Briston Maroney, during the All Aboard Tour.
In 2023, Carpenter officially charted with “Friend for Life,” which was a collaboration with X Ambassadors. To follow that up, he performed at South by Southwest in 2023 and toured with artists such as Tyler Childers on his Mule Pull tour, as well as Lewis Capaldi and Finneas. Reunited at last, in 2024 he released Country and the EP Marietta; he included a collaboration with the former member of Star Killers, Julien Baker, on the song “Yoke.” He would then go on to open for Baker during her Los Angeles residency.
Hey, Steve!
Now, he has released his sixth studio album, King of Having Fun, that features the song “Home Depot.” This indie-folk/country song is a compassionate yet clear portrait of “Steve,” an emotionally guarded, over-competent man who hyperfocuses on manual labor and physically laborious projects rather than dealing with his own feelings.
The song attempts, and succeeds, in looking at how men use practical projects such as building houses, hanging out in the hardware store, and acting like you know it all just to bottle up your emotions and keep your feelings at bay. With the lyrics, “his heart’s the only project he ain’t got the tools to figure out,” it establishes a contrast between someone who knows how to fix or build something and the heartbreaking realization that maybe you can’t figure yourself out.
