Note: Medium Build is doing a fundraiser for small venues, artists, gig workers, sex workers, and others out of work. They have a song out on Bandcamp, “Pink/Blue” and are collecting donations directly via Venmo at @nicholas-carpenter-2.
Medium Build is a project that cannot be easily pinned down, and that is how founding member Nick Carpenter likes it. Sometimes a solo endeavor, sometimes a full band, often a duo—at its core, Medium Build is a creative outlet. The project is loosely defined as a collective: It’s the effort of Carpenter, his close friend and collaborator James Glaves, and anyone else who has fallen into his orbit over the last five years that let him put the microphones where he wants.
Medium Build came to be while Carpenter was attending college in Nashville with a major in commercial songwriting—a path decidedly different than the one he is now on. While at school, Carpenter found that everyone he was collaborating with on projects was obsessed with making the cleanest possible product. Everything had to be perfect and hyper-glossy, with microphones placed just so, and everything EQ-ed in just the right way. He found it became overwhelming. “I was so sick of all the finesse,” Carpenter said in an interview with Double Negative. He went on, “So I created Medium Build as this side project I could do really shitty—like go to my buddy's house and give him a six-pack of beers and be like, Hey, will you just set up a microphone and leave me alone and let me do this lo-fi project.” And so out of sessions with friends paid for with packs of cigarettes and beer, Carpenter crafted Medium Build, surrounded by collaborators who would help him make the thing he wanted to make, even if it wasn’t perfect.
Five years later, Medium Build still embraces that same ethos, but rather than having permission to be “shitty,” it has gained permission not to be. Though still making lo-fi pop, Medium Build no longer exists to counter the pristine but has found its voice in the inbetween. Now based out of Anchorage, Alaska, the band has found its home in the scene, expanding from often being just Nick Carpenter to include James Glaves and a whole new circle of band members, collaborators, and friends who make the project what it is.
Carpenter moved to Anchorage from Atlanta, where he grew up, in 2016. He and his mom made the 4,300-mile drive in just four days, taking shifts and taking Adderall. He was burnt out on Nashville, explaining, “I started to resent music and a lot of the people that made it because I looked around me and saw these people making very commercial products and making lots of money and so I tried that. I was like, I'll do that, I want to make money.” So he started writing commercial pop-country songs professionally. “I just thought that I could do it for like a couple years and like get paid and then use that to finance Medium Build. But no,” he went on, “They stole my soul. Everything I did suffered because I didn't enjoy what I was doing.” So Carpenter decided to leave Nashville, leave his career behind and move to Anchorage, the city that had been his brother’s home for a decade.
While in some ways Carpenter’s move was to get away from music, he didn’t stay away for long. “I can't help it,” Carpenter said, I'm a sucker for an open mic and karaoke. If I can go sing in front of someone, I will.” And that is how he met James Glaves. Carpenter started going to an open mic at a bar in town every Tuesday where Glaves worked sound. One night Glaves came up to Carpenter after his set and gave him his card. A few weeks later he told Carpenter he was “pretty good.” Glaves told him he should play a show on the weekend and invited him over to try some stuff out. “He literally set up a microphone and was like, Play me every song you have. And I was like, Okay. And I sat there for like three hours, drinking beer and playing like 40 songs for this guy. And he was like, Okay, let's put a band together behind a couple of these.” And so they did, playing the first show as a full band Medium Build in December of that year. People showed up for that first show—and they kept showing up.
Medium Build started playing wherever and however they could. They would play any gig they could get, ranging from bars around Anchorage to shows six hours from the city in the small towns around Alaska that never see bands come through. Carpenter reflected on this era of Medium Build in the way he recalled Glaves describing it, saying, “James said that we were like a Medium Build cover band. We just played Medium Build songs, but we didn't do them how they needed to be done.” In Alaska, Carpenter explained “people just want you to play as long as you will, as loud as you will. Because everything's just fucking cold and dark. Or it's summer and it's like, we’ve got to rage, we got like three months of sunlight. So we just sort of matched that.” They played three-hour power sets as a bar rock band, with Prince, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Petty songs mixed in with their songs. “We also just partied the whole time,” Carpenter said, “James and I literally were just, hammered and didn't get anything done. We didn't work, we recorded like two songs.” In 2018, they quit drinking and started recording, but in doing so found a disconnect between what they were recording and what they had been playing. So the band changed and their audience did too.
Medium Build shifted back from a bar rock band to the lo-fi pop project it started as. They started playing tighter shows with their songs sounding like they do on the records, playing samples during sets and cutting out the “blues jamming.” Carpenter said he does miss the bar energy and those blues jams, but that there is something very comforting about knowing how a show is going to go before it starts. Since those first shows, Medium Build has blown up, releasing three records between 2018 and 2019 and selling out 400 person rooms in Anchorage. Since ending their days in the bar circuit, Medium Build has become a unique fixture in the Anchorage scene. Carpenter laughed explaining “Nowadays it's to the point where people just show up because it's, like, cool. It’s just a weird ego death. Like, I'm just the thing that this guy thinks he can go to like get laid, which is like a weird thing you have to process.” But the thing is too, they are good.
Their most recent record, Wild, released in November of 2019 was made in what Carpenter described as “a fucking tornado.” In May of 2019, Carpenter and Glaves' friend, Quinn Christopherson won the NPR Tiny Desk Contest. They had all been playing together, workshopping, recording, and producing music and his win was a big deal. It came with a tour and the support of NPR which has really become a giant in the world of launching independent artists, especially through the Tiny Desk Concerts and annual contest. Carpenter played guitar in Christopherson’s contest submission and became the backing band for him. Everything kind of exploded the win, prepping for what came next. Carpenter said, “None of us were trying to make an album,” they were all in this world of putting things together around Christopherson’s upcoming tours. Carpenter was playing in the band, Glaves was mixing as Christopherson recorded, and then they were going on back to back US tours with just five weeks in between. Medium Build used those five weeks to record Wild.
The record really seems to reflect the time in which it was made, the manic energy between tours and the end of an on-again-off-again relationship Carpenter had been in for years both informing the process and content. “We had these five weeks to sort of sandblast these songs we had and feel like you can hear it. I think the record is hot and sad and there's definitely really pretty tender moments on it. But it feels to me like you can hear the tension,” Carpenter said. It is quiet tension though that strings through the album, wrapping the stories that construct the album with the bluntness and honesty that is characteristic of Medium Build. There is a real mix of sounds on Wild, but they are all cohesive. Carpenter and Glaves worked on this record in tandem, but each also took pieces that are obviously their own, in some way necessitated by the time they had. “He’d be in one room writing and I'd be in the other room writing. And we were just trying to grind shit out,” Carpenter said. He described Wild as “the next level of James and I’s partnership. It's very much a collaborative thing.” He went on, “I think Medium Build has continually come from “Nick's protective bedroom thing” into this thing that is bigger than me.”
Medium Build has a really particular style of honesty that makes their music feel both comfortable and challenging. It is steeped in the kind of lived experience that makes things feel raw, but that rawness is wrapped in floating synths and driving drum tracks that make it danceable, make it something to get lost in. Carpenter talks about making music as a way to escape, but also a way to confront himself. It's an outlet. “I use songwriting as a way to escape myself or normalize my feelings. If I can sing something really fucked up. Then it's out of my head. And it also keeps me accountable.” He went on, “I use songwriting as this way of saying, Hey, by the way, I'm not okay. And then people are like, Oh, sick. Us too.” There is no pretense around Carpenter's lyrics, he lays things bare, telling stories that cut deep about relationships with people, with substances, with money, and with himself that are individual but deeply relatable. By another token, Glaves loves love songs. Carpenter said, “He goes to songs for, juice and inspiration. He loves positive, sort of like, dumb, sappy love songs. Which I used to judge but now I realized that that is its own version of what I'm doing.” And they mesh these places of inspiration to create sad songs you can dance to.
Carpenter has really settled into his role within Medium Build and his place in the community of musicians in Anchorage. He has standing dates with friends every week to workshop songs, he plays in bands, and produces work for other artists and alongside Glaves for Medium Build. “There's such a familial aspect of acquiring humans that I love to create with,” Carpenter says, pointing out nothing he has made has been made alone. From the first EPs on Bandcamp made with friends, to the 2016 records as Glaves jumped on board, to the 2018 records, Softboy and Roughboy, to Wild, Medium Build is no one thing, and no one person is behind it. It’s an ever-evolving collaboration built around friendships, a mutual love of 80s and 90s country music, soda water, and singing covers of Az Yet songs to each other. Something Carpenter said about the aftermath of creating an album like Wild seems to ring true, not just about the album, but about the band as a whole and the way it has evolved: “Never what you want to happen or think will happen happens, but it shakes out.”
And don’t forget, the vision is “Let’s keep it shitty.”
Medium Build is raising money to the small venues they were set to play on a tour this spring that had to be canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak in addition to artists, gig workers, sex workers, and others out of work. Donate directly on Venmo to @nicholas-carpenter-2 or purchase the song “Pink/Blue” on Bandcamp. You can also support the band on Patreon.
Listen to and purchase “Pink/Blue” on Bandcamp below:
