Case Oats: The Best of What’s Next

More engaged couples should make music together. Embodying the farmhouse caprices aglow in Paul and Linda McCartney’s early brilliance and the soulful, rootsy grooves imagined by Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, Casey Gomez Walker and Spencer Tweedy are two halves of an inquisitive, goofy, and sentimental brain. As Case Oats, they represent an exciting batch of songwriters sinking their teeth into big emotions and the loose, rambling twang of an ever-present Americana. These days especially, Gomez Walker’s unvarnished, sincere singing is drawing comparisons to David Berman and Kimya Dawson, two of her greatest heroes, and neither reference is all that far-fetched—the former being eerily present in the cadence of her song “Hallelujah,” which would sound right at home in Berman’s vocabulary. “I’ve always been drawn to people who don’t have what are ‘pretty voices,’” she reveals. “It’s always been inspiring to me, so to hear that my voice can resonate in the same way as those heroes is pretty special and is keeping me going, honestly.”

Gomez Walker and Tweedy met seven years ago, when they were both in their early twenties. “She slid into my DMs on Instagram,” Tweedy laughs. “That’s the naked truth.” While on vacation with his family, he posted a selfie, Gomez Walker replied to it with a heart emoji, they met up once he returned home, and they’ve been inseparable ever since. “Bluff” was the first song she showed Tweedy, and the “cough drop in your mouth, a blueberry kiss” line still floors him. “It was special and it was earnest,” he recalls. “And that’s all I ever want from a song. That’s the best thing I think it can do. Her voice immediately spoke to me. I remember feeling like she absolutely could write more songs if she wanted to.”

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And Gomez Walker did write more songs, after she and Tweedy recorded a version of “Bluff” at his college studio on a Sunday in Appleton, Wisconsin, put it on Bandcamp, and agreed to open a friend from Jersey’s show in Chicago in 2018 without having other material prepared. “I’m sure that, at the time, Spencer was like, ‘Yeah, we can do it! We just gotta get a band together,’” she remembers. “That catapulted me into getting together all of my writings and thoughts and everything, just making a setlist out of nothing.” A few of those songs carried on in her performances in the ensuing years, but most were left behind. The strummy “Seventeen” came to her quickly, because it was partially based on a short story she’d written in undergrad. Then she co-wrote “In a Bungalow,” “Bitter Root Lake,” and “Kentucky Cave” with Tweedy, all of which became the best parts of her debut album as Case Oats, Last Missouri Exit—named after a freeway sign connecting where her heart was born and where it now resides.

Gomez Walker grew up in Wildwood, Missouri and went to school down the hill in Eureka. Both are small, conservative towns with a “really big high school and a really big football team.” She played trumpet in the marching band and, when she tries describing what it was like to her neighbors in Chicago, it sounds like something from a teen movie. “It’s what I imagine high school was like,” Tweedy chimes in, chuckling. But Eureka, she says, was idyllic in the way that a landscape is idyllic, but nothing else—the rest of the town being beholden to a “dark, gross underbelly of racism.” Gomez Walker is pretty detached from it now, admitting that she was “one of those kids who ate lunch in the library completely willingly.” “I didn’t fuck with the people at my school—not in a ‘holier than thou’ way, but in an ‘I know my life is bigger than this’ way.”

She eventually left Missouri for Chicago, enrolling in Columbia College Chicago with the urge to study science journalism. But it didn’t take long for her to switch her major to creative writing. In the program, she learned to prioritize character and scene, but it’s a subconscious tool for her now. “I am thinking about how words fit together and how a story is told, but I think I’m not really thinking about it until after it’s written.” I’m hooked on Gomez Walker’s writing, and “Bitter Root Lake” is the big door prize of Last Missouri Exit, especially the “my love has never faded, I dream of your wet hair” couplet. “The most jarring or clear image that you can put into someone’s head with the smallest amount of words is really awesome,” she reveals. “A lot of songwriters I look up to do that. Same with authors and poets, just being able to put a couple words together and you are able to see it in your mind’s eye.”

Gomez Walker isn’t a self-taught musician or all that academic about the craft. In fact, she still thinks of herself as a “pretty amateur guitar player.” “I did, as all kids do, piano lessons for a year. I hated it, because I had an old, crabby teacher. My parents let me quit, and I kind of wish they didn’t,” she admits. “I had a guitar, but I didn’t really play it. It was a shitty Yamaha acoustic guitar, and it was really hard to play. So I was like, ‘Playing guitar is really hard, I don’t need to do that.’” But after graduating from Columbia in 2016, one of her best friends suggested she buy an electric guitar. “And I did, and that made me realize that playing guitar wasn’t as hard as I had originally thought.”

After a brief stint in a friend’s garage-rock project, Gomez Walker—with the help of Tweedy—soon found her people, playing shows with Max Subar, Jason Ashworth, and Nolan Chin, a trio that would turn Case Oats into a band. Fiddler Scott Daniel plays a role on Last Missouri Exit, as does touring member Chet Zenor. Perhaps the broader world hasn’t fully caught onto them yet but, to Gomez Walker, the five of them are Chicago’s equivalent to the Wrecking Crew. “We’re lucky that they’re also our best friends and the best dudes,” she says. “They play in a lot of different bands, and I think that that influences and informs the way that they play—because they’re playing so much, and they all have their own individual solo art, too. It’s so genuine, it’s so down to earth, the way that they play, and they’re able to approach songs without showing off. But there’s a level of skill that’s totally unmatched.”

The decision to make Last Missouri Exit wasn’t planned out very far in advance. During a hot summer weekend in August 2024, Gomez Walker and Tweedy agreed it was time to finally finish the songs, so they pulled together minimal gear and hitched themselves over to the “classic Chicago bungalow” shared by Subar, Ashworth, and Zenor and did the music “Big Pink-style.” Recording in the boys’ basement, they tracked everything but vocals and overdubs, tumbling into deep pockets of light yet furious country songs that leave chemtrails of pedal steel and bowed fiddle in their dusk. Barefoot and bellies full of vegan food and seltzers, Case Oats finished the album in two days, and you can hear some discomfort from the gobsmacking Lake Michigan humidity in the record’s mix. “There was so much trust between all of us,” Gomez Walker says. “We’d been playing those songs live a lot, so we were able to get in the room and play them exactly like we’d been playing them.” Overanalyzing was absent from the room, because Gomez Walker tends to prefer the first version of everything in every facet of her life.

Merge Records’ decision to release Last Missouri Exit in August was serendipitous, Tweedy suggests, because he thinks it’s a summer record best articulated by the porch-swing image in the song “Tennessee.” “I sum up Casey’s life philosophy as the elevation and valorization of porch-sitting,” he says. “So many things about the lyrics, so many things about the way the song sounds to me, [sound like] the thick of the summer.” With any project that involves the Tweedy name and some twang, alt-country citations come aplenty. Spencer’s father, Jeff, helped build the sub-genre through his work in Uncle Tupelo and then Wilco, after all, and Last Missouri Exit is a tremendous debut in that lineage. But Spencer and Casey find themselves more interested in resisting the pitfalls of being pigeonholed by alt-country’s current relevancy and resurgence. “If it naturally sounds like this stuff or this trend, then that’s what it is,” Tweedy expands. “If not, we’re not going to deliberately shoehorn something into a box, because that’s just missing the point to us. I’m somebody who has always sought to remain boundaryless and to think of music in a fundamental, open way, not ‘we work in a genre, or ‘we have to sound like this.’”

Case Oats, as a project, is approached with a sense of anxiety because of this. Gomez Walker and Tweedy don’t want to “miss the point” but “remain rooted in the thing that actually makes it exciting to discover sounds and come up with new approaches to getting a song across.” What makes Last Missouri Exit exciting is its subconscious, good-natured, and affecting tribute to the Midwest and how Gomez Walker and Tweedy have grown up within it. They write what they know, Gomez Walker especially, and the Midwest is all she’s ever known. You can hear it capstone in “Nora,” when she sings, “I came and went, moved away, as time bent,” and again in “Wishing Stone,” when she sings, “You’re my way back home, love you more than my need to roam.” “My brain is often stuck and sitting in a place that looks like my hometown, or close to it,” Gomez Walker gestures. “Having a yearning for rivers and lakes and being outside in the summer is, really, all I was thinking about when I was writing these songs.” And like Berman before her, she has an ability to drop listeners into mid-conversations with arresting, homespun detail (“If you love me still, after all I’ve done wrong, then put the kettle on. There’s so much left to save”).

But more than anything, Last Missouri Exit is a coming-of-age album written by someone in their twenties and released when they’re 30. If Gomez Walker had made it any sooner, she reckons, it just wouldn’t have been right. “The songs had to sit and grow a bit,” she says. “They sound different than they did when we wrote them, and there’s something to be said about waiting to release art until it’s totally ready.” That patient perspective is what makes a track like “Seventeen” and a line like “I used to feel things, they meant something back then” so damn good. When you’re a teenager, Gomez Walker argues, everything feels like “the end of the world.” But what she realized was, as the lifespan of her songs widened, she never strayed too far from her 17-year-old self, because she believes that “every emotion feels big.” And she holds onto that throughout the album, revealing that “inflating emotions” is a part of how she writes. “Things do feel big, and it’s okay to let them feel big and let them loom a little bit when you’re thinking about it.”

Tweedy chimes in, saying that Gomez Walker has a knack for making emotions and experiences “feel big and feel heavy”—that she can right up to the edge of the cliff without falling off, so to speak. “The stakes are high, and you get the sense of things mattering, even if it’s in a somewhat angsty way or memories of adolescence while not overdoing it,” he elaborates. “I think that’s a tough thing to pull off, and she seems to do it as a matter of course all the time.” Some people sit down to write a song and their brains are too present in the room. But Tweedy has watched Gomez Walker’s heart lead the way for some time, and it continues to do so on the new material they’re working on, like “Wonderful Things,” which traffics in “grief and losing” more than the “all-encompassing feeling of teenagehood.” “To make songs that feel good, I think [following your heart] is a requirement,” Tweedy concludes, before flashing a smile at Gomez Walker. “To her, it’s the only option.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Case Oats: The Best of What’s Next

RIYL: Purple Mountains, Sarah Jarosz, The Band, and Kimya Dawson.