Medium Build Lives Quite the Life in Alaska: 'They Don't Care About What's Cool' (Exclusive)

• Medium build, born Nick Carpenter, released his album Earth in April
• “These songs are autobiographical,” the musician tells PEOPLE. “I didn’t edit it too much”
• Medium Build’s headlining tour kicked off in the US last week

Singer/songwriter Nick Carpenter — the groundbreaking artist known as Medium Build — lives in Alaska in a classic ’60s two-story house.

“You enter the entrance and then walk five steps down to the level and you go five steps up level,” says Carpenter, 33, during a recent visit to Nashville. “Everything is built as cheaply as possible. It’s the most disgusting infrastructure I’ve ever seen, next to the most beautiful mountains and rivers you’ve ever seen.”

It’s a place Carpenter now calls home, even as he’s still getting used to some of the area’s obvious nuances. “My suburban Atlanta brain can’t fathom that you would move thousands of miles away from civilization and then share a wall with someone,” Carpenter admits with a laugh. “It seems so crazy to be so close to nothing, but then you can hear your neighbors watching Breaking Bad. Not my idea of ​​a good time.”

However, he found himself in Alaska for the first time in 2009, after his brother Jack moved there to work as a fisherman.

“I had just graduated from high school,” Carpenter recalls. “I mean, I’ve never been in the snow. I was absolutely kicked ass. I got chewed up and then I ran away. I tucked my tail between my legs and said, ‘Mom, I’m coming home.'”

Medium build.

Tyler Krippaehne

But the soon-to-be medium-sized man returned a few years later. “I had to live to the ripe old age of 24 before I could fully appreciate Alaska,” reflects Carpenter. “At that point I had a little more comfort money and I had more skills so I could afford a jacket and gloves. But our first winter there we didn’t even have a car.”

But Carpenter made it, and said he began to flourish in an environment where, unlike Nashville or Atlanta, people didn’t care about the lives others led.

“They don’t care what’s cool,” he says of life in Alaska. “I really thrived on it because I’m not very cool and I didn’t really enjoy trying to keep up with the trends when I was in the lower 48, as they call it.”

It’s the all-encompassing environment in which Carpenter created his fifth studio album Earthbody of work featuring the current single “Stick Around” which seems to have finally hit Carpenter’s true DNA.

“These songs are autobiographical,” says Carpenter. “I didn’t over-edit it. I try to hunt for wherever the intense emotion is coming from. Then I try to document it, and then I let it go. Sometimes it’s a little awkward because maybe I was feeling kind of creepy and emotional that day, and I wrote something really intense, and now I have to sing for the rest of my life.” He is laughing. “But yeah, I said what I thought and then got out of the way.”

This technique works great on “Crying Over U.” “It’s a fun little exhumation of a deep-seated kind of friendship and wishing there was more, but also realizing there might never be,” he explains of the song, which he co-wrote with Jacob LiBassi and Jeremy Schmetterer.

Medium build and Holly Humberstone.

Charlotte Alex

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Not surprisingly, there is also a kind of country that can be heard in all the songs Earthan obvious nod to Carpenter’s family history.

“My mom is from the Midwest and my dad is from rural South Carolina, so I have this kind of cultural mix,” says Carpenter, who has opened for Holly Humberstone, Finneas and Lewis Capaldi. “I grew up kind of deprived of country culture. And then when I moved to Tennessee for songwriting in college, all of a sudden I was blown away by all that stuff. It was so familiar.”

It felt known because it was.

“My dad has all this pain from listening to George Jones on the radio when he was 5 and wondering if he’s going to have breakfast,” explains Carpenter, whose Medium Build headlining tour kicked off last week. “And so I’ve spent the last 10 years just going through country music and learning for the first time about things that would be on the radio during my in childhood, my dad had a better relationship with him his childhood. And so, I feel that the earth is deep inside me, whether I want it or not.”

He laughs, then thinks about it again. “There’s a lot of respect and love for country music in my bones, but I’m more of an indie folk…indie queer folk s— guy.”

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Source: HIS Education