Medium Build, also known as Nicholas Carpenter, is a sleeper in a star-studded yeehaw lineup, behind Post Malone, Sturgill Simpson, Shaboozey, and CMAT.
But he’s the one who captured my heart at the tiny Panhandle stage, wielding his pitch-perfect voice and brilliant band in a set that defines what modern country ought to be.
The headline is maybe a bit of a misnomer — it mostly reflects my own cellular-level distaste for modern bro-country, with all its bland excess in storytelling and execution. Carpenter (no relation to pop goddess Sabrina) looks like he could, in another parallel universe, be everything I hate about the dilution of country as a genre. I shake my fist at the clouds while muttering that back in the day, country wasn’t a formulaic sound, it was an ethos: one that championed the everyday melancholy of working people, navigating small joys and big heartbreaks with a storyteller’s heart.
It’s not a coincidence that I swooned at Carpenter’s performance of “Stick Around,” the closing track to his 2024 album Country. That album title is a declaration of intent, and his expression of the genre’s history as a diary of broken men is as beautiful and timeless as ever.
The song is an adoring, earnest thank-you note to a lover: “When you told me I didn’t have to be someone … well, I cried like a homesick child,” Carpenter crooned.
Over his 40-minute set, Medium Build aimed for the heart with line after line laced with yearning. In “Never Learned to Dance,” Carpenter used his gravelly baritone to outline the crushing sensation of feeling like an imposter. He set the scene with a painterly touch: “Kids dressed up like Mormons, not sure if it’s irony... Double Casamigos hiding in the balcony,” he murmurs, invoking the well-worn country trope of name-checking booze, but drenched with sepia-toned nostalgia.
Then he stripped himself down to the visage of an average nobody with nothing much to do, lamenting that he needs “better shit to give a shit about.”
“The things that I don't know could fill a million fucking houses — I never learned to dance,” he cried to the crowd.
In every song, I found breadcrumbs into the psyche and person of Carpenter. In his gorgeous ballad “In My Room,” he tipped his queerness within a subtle nod to childhood, portraying the heart of a young man running from a loneliness that feels endemic, all while his dad returns late from an “11-hour shift.”
“There's a kid who tried on all his brother's clothes — who hates the way he looks and is bad at sayin' no,” he sang. “Who's tryin' so damn hard to never let it show, and sometimes he's alone when he's at home…”
In so many ways, Medium Build pays tribute to the subtle histrionics of vintage country OGs like Hank Williams and Merle Haggard, but I thought of someone else while mulling his storytelling. I know it’s hyperbole to say that Carpenter’s writing reminded me of the brutal honesty of Joni Mitchell. But at his tidy Outside Lands set, Carpenter absolutely captured her signature sense of weary observation, varnishing it with distorted riffs and the dulcet swings of a lap-steel guitar.
