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

The singer-songwriter, born Nick Carpenter, released his album 'Country' in April

• Medium Build, born Nick Carpenter, released his album Country in April

• "These songs are autobiographical," the musician tells PEOPLE. "I didn’t edit it too hard"

• Medium Build's headlining tour kicked off in the U.S. last week

Singer/songwriter Nick Carpenter — the groundbreaking artist known as Medium Build — lives in Alaska in a classic '60s split-level house.

"You walk in the entry and then you go five steps down to a level and you go five steps up to a level," says Carpenter, 33, during a recent visit to Nashville. "Everything is built as cheap as possible. It's the most hideous infrastructure I've ever seen, next to the most beautiful mountains and rivers you've ever seen."

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

Nevertheless, he found himself in Alaska for the first time in 2009, after his brother Jack had moved there to take a fishing job.

"I had just graduated high school," remembers Carpenter. "I mean, I had never been in snow. I absolutely got my ass kicked. I got chewed up and then ran. I tucked my tail between my legs and said, 'Mom, I’m coming home.'"

But the man that soon would become Medium Build would return a handful of years later. "I had to get to the ripe old age of 24 before I could fully appreciate Alaska," Carpenter reflects. "At that point, I had a bit more comfort money and had more skills so I could afford a down jacket and gloves. But our first winter there, we didn't even have a car."

But Carpenter made it work, and said he began to flourish in the environment where, unlike Nashville or Atlanta, people really didn’t care about the life anyone else led.

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

It’s this all-encompassing environment that Carpenter created his fifth studio album Country, a body of work featuring the current single "Stick Around" that seems to finally hit on Carpenter’s true DNA.

"These songs are autobiographical," says Carpenter. "I didn’t edit it too hard. I try to chase wherever the intense emotion comes from. I then try to document that, and then I let it go. Sometimes it's kind of embarrassing because maybe I felt kind of cringey and emotional that day, and I wrote something really intense, and now I have to sing it for the rest of my life." He laughs. "But yeah, I said what I meant and then I got out of the way."

This technique works beautifully on the track "Crying Over U." "It's a fun little sort of exhuming of a deep-seated sort of friendship and wishing there was more, but also realizing maybe it will never be," he explains of the song he wrote alongside Jacob LiBassi and Jeremy Schmetterer.

Related: Holly Humberstone Gets Vulnerable About Her 'Double Life' as a Singer and Homebody on Her New Album (Exclusive)

Not surprisingly, there is also strains of country that can be heard throughout the songs of Country, an obvious nod to Carpenter's family history.

"My mom is from the Midwest and my dad is from rural South Carolina, so I've got this sort of mix of cultures," says Carpenter, who has opened for the likes of Holly Humberstone, Finneas and Lewis Capaldi. "I grew up kind of devoid of country culture. And then when I moved to Tennessee for songwriting in college, all of a sudden, I was just blasted with all these things. It felt so familiar."

It felt familiar because it was.

"My dad has all this pain attached to hearing George Jones on the radio when he was 5 years old and wondering if they were going to have breakfast," explains Carpenter, whose Medium Build headline tour kicked off last week. "And so, I've spent the past 10 years just going through country music and learning for the first time about the stuff that would've been on the radio during my childhood had my dad had a better relationship with his childhood. And so, I feel like country is deeply in me, whether I want it to be or not."

He lets out a laugh, then reconsiders the point. "There's a lot of respect and love for country music in my bones, but I'm more of an indie folk guy…indie queer folk s---."

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