Medium Build Interview: ‘King of Having Fun’ Album, Getting Sober

When Rolling Stone final talked with folk-rock songwriter Medium Build, he admitted to being concerned about all he’s achieved all of a sudden disappearing.

“There’s a huge fear of: If I stopped working, will it all go away?” he stated final 12 months.

While these issues didn’t come true, the strain to maintain his foot on the gasoline almost destroyed him.

Nick Carpenter beginning releasing music underneath the identify Medium Build with the 2016 album Falling Apart. By 2023, he was turning red-hot: A collab with X Ambassadors, “Friend for Life,” was on the charts, he performed Coachella, after which toured with Tyler Childers. Onstage, Carpenter was prepared for the highlight. Away from it, although, he struggled with fame, with consideration, and with alcohol.

“I said ‘Yes’ to every support slot. We’re opening for pop bands, country bands, rock bands, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Then we got our first headline run. Halfway through that, the drinking caught up with me,” he says. “I was getting blacked out during the shows — chasing my heroes, right?”

According to Carpenter, being identified, and even having his songs identified, messed together with his head. He needed listeners to commune with the music after all, however all that went together with it caught him off-guard. “I wanted people to sing, but people always found me, even if I was hanging out by the van, just to yell, ‘Hey Nick!’ was a little too much. I think I was coping with it by just getting as fucked up as humanly possible,” he says.

By the top of 2024, Carpenter discovered himself in Australia opening for Role Model. He was in his mid-30s and considered himself as a people artist, one closely influenced by Sean McConnell, a Nashville mainstay whose intensely private songwriting helped Carpenter form his personal artwork. Carpenter was writing and recording music about alcohol and despair, however right here he was enjoying for an Australian crowd made up predominantly of youngsters. Combine that with “throwing money at a kid who had never had money,” and he hit an infleection level. Carpenter texted his supervisor: “If I don’t change something, and if we don’t start saying no to some shit, I’m gonna fucking die.”

It’s to Carpenter’s credit score that he acknowledged the place he was headed, and to his supervisor for listening. Three months into restoration, Carpenter wrote the majority of King of Having Fun, which dropped this week by way of Slowplay and Island information. It’s his sixth studio album and first since 2024’s Country, which landed Medium Build a featured place in Rolling Stone’s Future of Music a 12 months later.

The 15-track King of Having Fun is a stark departure from the remainder of the Medium Build catalog, which was largely created by Carpenter in makeshift studios, enjoying a number of devices and slicing songs effectively at little value. Even songs that elevated his profile — like 2024’s “Yoke,” that includes Carpenter’s school classmate, Julien Baker — got here from such a course of. This time round, Carpenter needed to make a document that mirrored the expertise of seeing Medium Build dwell. He introduced in producer Paul Rogers to direct the undertaking and took his complete touring band into the studio with him.

“It was two big things,” Carpenter tells Rolling Stone. “One, I’m gonna take a break, and I’m gonna get sober. And I’m gonna make a record that sounds like what we sound like live.”

What he finally made in King of Having Fun is essentially the most full Medium Build album but. The parts of rock, nation, and blues that affect Carpenter are all around the document, however it’s a people album at coronary heart, and restoration is ever-present. In the title monitor, he laments, “Since when do I need other shit to fall asleep? I used to be the king of having fun.”  

Even essentially the most adventurous entry on the document, “In My Gut,” stays firmly in a people lane. It’s a tune Carpenter wrote together with his associate, the singer-songwriter Annika Bennett, within the throes of his struggles with fame and alcohol. A month later, they broke up, and processing the connection grew to become one other pillar of King of Having Fun. The penultimate monitor, “Thank You Cook,” got here straight from their cut up.

“I kind of got my shit together, and ‘Cook’ is my nickname for her,” Carpenter says of Bennett. “I just wanted her to know that, if we never talked again, I’m gonna get better, and thanks for loving a guy that was on a path of self-destruction.”

Carpenter and Bennett have since reconciled. They’re again collectively, have a brand new pet, and ceaselessly journey. “She’s incredible,” Carpenter raves.

Whether Medium Build has really slowed down since Carpenter’s 2024 epiphany is a matter of opinion. Already this summer season, he’s been on an intensive area run opening for Mumford & Sons, together with three nights at Madison Square Garden. In and across the tour and releasing singles off King of Having Fun, he discovered time to collaborate with Evan Honer on the track “Pull Me Out,” for Honer’s 4 songs EP. In October, he’ll kick off a coast-to-coast headlining tour hitting venues just like the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, Metro in Chicago, and Brooklyn Bowl in Nashville.

Carpenter says he’s decided to be taught from this trek, nonetheless. When he hits the street with Mumford & Sons, he desires to know how they method touring. When he’s headlining, his eyes are on the venue administration and the way they work together together with his crew. His inquisitiveness is a trait inherited from his father, who nonetheless grills Carpenter throughout breaks in excursions. If touring is Carpenter’s future, he desires to be armed with essentially the most data attainable to navigate it.

“Every manager will tell you there’s a blueprint, and then you see 20 different camps and realize, ‘There’s no fucking blueprint.’ Everyone’s lying,” he says. “Everyone’s telling you they know what the answer is, and there’s not one.”

JOSH CRUTCHMER is a journalist and writer whose upcoming guide, Sonoran Sounds, is about for launch in March 2027 by way of Back Lounge Publishing.