Stick Around: Medium Build Is Achieving His Dreams
Ashwin Street in East London is a far cry away from the hustle and bustle of the city.
CLASH is here to meet Indie-country singer-songwriter Nick Carpenter who is going from strength to strength as Medium Build. The Anchorage, Alaska-born musician is in a good place.
Navigating through life, Carpenter appears to have found a healthy formular. Unsurprisingly, music has a part to play. The release of ‘Marietta’, towards the end of last year, saw the singer and guitarist taking a bird’s-eye view, but it still gets up close. The seeing things from above perspective not only gives the songs an extra layer, and the recent EP goes the extra mile to achieve on both levels.
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If ‘Country’, Carpenter’s album released last year, digs a bit deeper exploring several current relationships, seen through the lens of growing up, how he was raised, the EP uses an even tighter lens to zoom in. The material stretches from a song about his parents and the religious influence they brought in. “The past year or two felt like a 20-year loop had closed. I was the dog that caught the car that it was chasing, and then didn’t know who it was anymore.”
It’s not without a hint of self-irony that he refers to it as a “Hey Nick, you are 33 years old sort of moment,” there were years where he went through a lot of things. “You’ve been playing music since you were 12. You’ve been doing the Medium Build thing for 10 years, and now you’ve arrived, people around here have arrived. Here’s your deal.”
But while three decades is a decent amount of time, it’s time well spent, there has been a lot of reflection, decision-making and action, with music being the recurring thread throughout it all, a powerful constant in his life and career.
It has not all been plain sailing. There was a process of de-selecting a religious life, for a person growing up a conservative household, it’s a huge thing. If the ability to enjoy a harmonious relationship with both parents is in place now, it is probably not something that would have been easily imaginable a few years back.
Growing up in the church, there is fear around being different. “It’s so homogeneous. Men and women dress and talk in a certain way. I was always just a soft kid, a very sensitive boy.”
“I wasn’t out in the garage with my dad, under the car. I was in the kitchen with my mum, dancing to Motown, and helping her cut vegetables for dinner. It’s funny, because even talking about it now, it feels like stuff that probably won’t be something to report on 30 years from now.”
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In musical terms, however, it has been useful for getting exposure to a broad palette of style and genre. For Carpenter it came to mean emo on one side, and indie guitar on the other. “It probably started two sentiments, the sappy emo music, and then my brother and my dad gave me the Stones and Radiohead, music that almost feels boyish at times, but they are bands I like very much.”
Complex emotional factors would play out behind the scenes. Class can be a trigger. Within the family it has been a drive to achieve better things for Nick and his brother, a push to move from working to middle class. Naturally, this is something the musician only came to understand as an adult.
“I realised that there was so much from my childhood that I hadn’t processed. I’ve just been grinding and trying to achieve. So now that I got to the dreams of my dad, who had come from a very working-class background, and a poor, low level of education. His mum hadn’t gone to high school.”
Despite the big goal combined with the best will in the world to achieve class lifting, the aim to get the two sons further in life has not necessarily led to endless spells of happiness. “It felt like I achieved my dad’s dreams, and then I basically sat in that asking what are my dreams? Who do I want to be, if this is what I’ve been chasing my whole life, because I thought it was the thing. I’m here now.”
Every now and then it comes back to haunt him. “I still have sadness,” he insists. “I still have pain. I can’t stop my parents from waging, I can’t stop my relationships from failing if I don’t show up. There’s just no magic button, even if I got all the dreams.”
What does help is storytelling, which is critical to Carpenter’s creative wellbeing. So much that, more frequently than not, his songwriting process will begin with a couple of lyrics, as opposed to a melody or bits of instrumentation.
Refreshingly, nothing is absolute in Carpenter’s lyrical universe, though it’s as if the idea of how a genre ought to be used gets a thorough shake up, is forever reinvented. “I think my pitch is soul songs for indie queer kids or country music for city kids. Lyrics are usually the first thing I think about, so I’m always trying to put storytelling elements in there.”
The appeal of words or literature is clearly trackable. As a young person in Atlanta the attraction to hip hop culture was there from early on, and his brother was heavily into Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Later it was signing up for an English literature class at high school that helped develop some of the core creative tools.
“I could read a beautiful short story and appreciate how words were used. But then I was going home, and I was listening to Radiohead and early Kanye. I was reading lyrics and got into indie rock bands like The Shins.”
It was during his first semester of college, when he took a poetry class that a life changing event happened. The teacher was a poet, who loved hip hop. He began giving away books of poetry, making poetry available for the students. “We started analysing lyrics, even corny pop. He would bring in Drake, because he was trying to get the kids involved. He would say things like ‘whatever you guys like bringing in we’ll dissect’.“
Of course, this has led to a way of simply loving words. At times it involves listening to the new Kendrick Lamar album. At another junction, it will be listening to the latest from Tyler, The Creator. “It will mainly be to hear what they’re thinking about. I totally get the connection to rap and hip-hop, they work for me, a lot of the rappers are magnificent lyricists.”
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Now that he has established his own individual, organic way of writing lyrics and music, it stands in some contrast to the more popular, commercial way of working with songwriting, he finds. He has experiences of writing in cities like Nashville, New York and London with professional songwriters and producers, sessions during which the aim is to write songs quickly, on the spot. Churn them out.
“The goal is to crank out a song in an afternoon. It’s not my favourite way to do it. There’s a couple of them on the record that were written like that, but generally the lyrics are something I take so seriously, that I sometimes feel I need to walk away. We’ll start the music, maybe there’s a couple chords going, there’s a tempo, a groove. I’ll go out of the room to write the words.”
The favourite way is to write the words as prose first before sitting down, start writing the music and see what can match. The words are what he doesn’t want to give away, the part that he enjoys most. Making sure that the phrase is in the cadence, and having the essence of a couple consonants placed. Sometimes, if the phrases are written first, the words, the syllables will inform the melody. It’s an art.
Nick Carpenter is no longer at the start of his journey. There is plenty of life experience and knowledge about who he is, what he wants to achieve. It’s a rich tapestry he can continue to build on, it makes him who is. Looking to the future, this awareness is invaluable.
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