Case Oats is a Chicago-based band led by Casey Gomez Walker, who never thought she’d write songs when she was in school for creative writing. Before Case Oats – rounded out by Spencer Tweedy on drums, Max Subar on guitar and pedal steel, Jason Ashworth on bass, Scott Daniel on fiddle, and Nolan Chin on piano and organ – Gomez Walker had played in a garage rock band, but this project could serve as a vessel for the kinds of poems and short stories she’d been left with after college. She posted the first Case Oats track, ‘Bluff’, just a day after tracking it with Tweedy, whom she’d been dating for about six months. The band recorded their debut album, Last Missouri Exit, out Friday, after months of playing its songs on the road, which is evident in their buoyant, easygoing confidence. It’s named after a sign on the freeway to Chicago from Gomez Walker’s hometown that, one day, signalled the end of childhood for her. So Last Missouri Exit is a record of early adulthood, but a uniquely incisive and generous one at that, harbouring tenderness for the roughest parts of ourselves that surface in those transitional moments. Seeing it in her friends and bandmates first, Gomez Walker sings with the warmth of knowing the rest of the world will relate.
We caught up with Case Oats’ Casey Gomez Walker and Spencer Tweedy for the latest edition of our Artist Spotlight series to talk about how the band got together, Walker’s creative writing background, their recording process, and more.
The last song on the record, ‘Bluff’, is actually the first one that you got together to record. What do you remember about that day?
Casey Gomez Walker: I wrote it alone in my bedroom, and I hadn’t sat down and written a song start to finish with the guitar before. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all, and that’s just what came out. Spencer was still in college, and he had a studio up in Appleton, Wisconsin, and I knew I was going to visit him that weekend. We had been dating, but not for super long. I texted Spencer, and I asked him if, on one of the days when I was there, he’d be down to record something together. And that’s what we did. The Sunday I was there, we went in, and we just tracked it. We changed a couple of the lyrics, but kept pretty much everything exactly as it was. Spencer sang some background vocals, and I think the next day, I put it out on Bandcamp. I was just so excited to have a song.
Were you anxious at any point before putting it out?
CGW: No. [laughs] I’d never done anything like it before. I think I was just excited. I wasn’t trying to be a musician or make music, or make it with music. At that point, it was a very side thing and something that I was very newly getting into. So anything that I was doing with it that sounded okay, I was excited about.
What excited you, Spencer, about that session?
Spencer Tweedy: The sweetness of the song, but also its unique poetic identity. Because it starts out with the line, “Sorry I talked about hockey too much,” and I remember being so struck by that. Like, what kind of a way is that to start a song? [laughs] And it’s so Casey. It’s not necessarily a completely autobiographical song, but that line is true to self, being into hockey literally, but also the notion of starting off on that foot of an anxious love or something. I liked the chords, I liked the instruments of it. I was just excited to record.
Do you mind sharing how the two of you met and maybe your first impressions of each other at the time?
CGW: Yeah. I slid into Spencer’s DMs on Instagram. [laughs] I reacted to a selfie that he had posted on his story when stories were first a thing, and then he messaged back with a wave emoji. We just started talking. I was in Saint Louis, and he was in LA. We were not in the same place at the same time, but we both were on vacation, and the soonest he could hang out was on New Year’s Eve. He asked me if I wanted to, and I was like, “Sure, why not?” And we planned a date on New Year’s Eve. We went out to dinner and then hung out with my friends at the time, and it was great. It was very easy from the first moment. I was anxious and excited and nervous, but it definitely felt very normal right away.
ST: Yeah. And I should say, our version of “slid into DMs” is simply a heart emoji.
CGW: Yeah, I didn’t say anything sleazy. [laughs] That was back in the day when all you could reply to with Instagram stories besides texting something was a heart.
ST: That would actually send some big old heart icon. But then at some point, weeks into our relationship, Casey was like, “You probably got messages like that all the time, right?” And I was like, “No. Just you.” And I saw it, and I was like, “I wanna talk to this person.” So, yeah, we met up on New Year’s Eve, and it started right there.
CGW: We spent the next twenty-four hours together, and there was not really any question.
Before recording ‘Bluff’, had you been thinking about writing songs for a while?
CGW: I’d been thinking about writing songs for a while. I mean, I was always writing. I didn’t necessarily think that everything I was writing was a song or was meant to be a song, but I was playing a lot of music with my best friend, Luke, and we were trying to do more of a garage rock thing. I had built a bit of that muscle, but I hadn’t written anything alone by myself that felt like totally me.
I know you had just finished school for creative writing. Did it feel like building a different kind of muscle, fitting your ideas into songs?
CGW: Yeah, I graduated from creative writing school back in 2016, not long after I started writing songs for the album. I think it was an easy transition. I was already writing poetry and short-form stuff. Figuring out ways to write a story that was with the least amount of words possible was always interesting to me. Something very sparse. And I just hadn’t really made the connection totally that that was songwriting, even when I was in writing school. I’m not thinking about it in the forefront of my brain when I’m songwriting, but I think there are elements of how to write a scene and how things take place and what’s the most important thing to focus on that are definitely in my head. It was just easy to start songwriting because I had spent so much time thinking about what makes a story, whether that’s autobiographical or fiction.
Do you feel like you need to have a different, more personal connection to a story, knowing you’ll be singing it?
CGW: I think it just made me feel closer to it. Something I loved in creative writing school was when we got to read our pieces out loud, because everything I’ve always written is very autobiographical. A lot of what I was writing in college was also a little bit fictionalized, but it still is very true to me and usually about something that had happened to me, something I knew. I was writing what I knew; same thing with songwriting. I think there’s a bit of a catharsis with reading work out loud, so I think that singing songs has always felt like the best thing because it’s a form of oral storytelling that is such an important thing to humans in general. It was this very innate connection.
Spencer, you mentioned the sweetness – what else struck you about seeing Casey’s songs in their earlier stages?
ST: I think that there’s a lot of pain around relationships that never sounds like whining, and there’s an ethics about relationships, or even more broadly, about living life in a general sense. It’s done with a really light touch and with zero pretension, so you don’t even know that you’re being presented with a model or a philosophy about what’s right and good ways to spend your time. There’s great use of imagery. Casey was talking about scenes – I think about images, like in the song ‘Tennessee’, of braiding your sister’s hair. A small human moment like that, to me, says a lot because it says a lot about the relationship with your sister. There are a lot of moments of mistreatment or people behaving badly toward each other, and the way that those stories are presented is never ham-fisted. I think that’s a hard thing to pull off.
I was thinking of the song ‘Hallelujah’. There’s a bitterness and a spikiness to the song, even musically, but then it becomes a lot more about empathy.
ST: Yeah, and look how, musically and lyrically, the chorus turns toward just having each other. That’s pretty optimistic.
CGW: Yeah. And that song came from a very angry place, but, obviously, not about myself. It was about my sister and my best friend who had both just gotten out of horrible relationships, and it’s just a feeling of relief. You have some people that love you, and there are so many wonderful things. It’s like, “Thank god you’re not stuck with this horribleness.” [laughs] It literally felt like a feeling of hallelujah. And I’m not a religious person.
ST: Belief?
CGW: Yeah.
The story goes that you bluffed your way into playing your first show, saying you had a band when you didn’t. I’m curious how it was this specific group of people that became Case Oats.
CGW: The first show that we played was a different lineup of players, and it just evolved. Our two really good friends, Max and Jason, our bass player and our guitar player, play in a lot of different bands. They live close to us and lived close to us at the time, and I was wanting to do a Halloween cover set of Creedence Clearwater Revival. I just asked them to do that with me, and that was the first time I had played with them. Honestly, for what it was, it was a great set. And from then on, it was like, “Do you guys want to play actual shows with me?” Max and Jason are best friends with each other and were roommates at the time, and they have a very special way of bouncing off each other when they’re playing.
ST: They went to high school together.
CGW: But also, just listening as players and being really mindful of the song and figuring out where they fit in. They wrote all of their parts to the songs on the record, and there was never any question about what they did. It was just like, “Yeah, of course. That’s what sounds good.” And they’re our best friends, truly. It’s such a special thing to be able to play music with your best friends. And then Scott Daniel, who is our fiddle player, didn’t originally play with us our first few shows, but I saw Scott playing with our friend, Sarah Weddle, and the way that they fit in the music and were able to sit on top of songs, I was like, “Oh my god.,I would love to play with Scott.” I was also imagining a fiddle on the songs already, so I asked Scott to play with us, and they agreed. They’re a fun hang and fit in well with all of us. And, of course, Spencer, drumming, and helping songwrite and coming with his own touch to it.
I understand part of what made it feel easy when you went in to record was just the fact that you’d been playing shows together. Were there songs that you maybe weren’t sure would work, or how to get them to work?
CGW: That’s a good question. I don’t think, when we initially tracked all the guitar and bass and drums that one weekend, there was much of a question. It was all songs we had played live. We played them exactly as we had played live. Maybe ‘In a Bungalow’ was new at that point when we recorded it, but it fit in with everything else, and it was easy. I think maybe when we then later recorded vocals, the only song that was different is ‘Nora’, because when we play it live, we sing it differently because we sing it all together. And when Spencer and I were recording the vocals for that, it just didn’t work, so that took a different form for the record, which is my vocals overlapping with each other rather than just saying it on repeat. I think we’ll always play it live in the original form, but it’s different on the record. I think everything else was very lived-in. And then adding the fiddle and the pedal seal and the organ and piano on top of it was very much just like, “How does this fit in?” rather than “Will it work?”
What about the pulse of the song? Were you prone to slowing things down or speeding things up, or was that also pretty much locked in?
ST: I feel like we were really relaxed. We did maybe three or four live takes of each song to make sure we got it. And we didn’t even listen to anything or go back and pick one in the moment. We just ran through everything just about that many times. I remember, when Casey and I were opening up the basic tracks that we did with the whole band later to start adding vocals and things, feeling really proud and relieved that the tracks sounded so stable and assured. I mean, I’m not surprised because everyone in the group is really experienced and has been playing a long time and has really good musicianship. I think a great example is listening to ‘Wishing Stone’ and just feeling how completely settled everybody is in the tempo that we picked. Not every group can do that because a lot of people just feel rambunctious, especially when you’re recording, and that makes people feel nervous. Particularly between me and Jason, the bass player, but also Max and Casey, everyone who is involved in the original tracking – there’s just a lot of unspoken assuredness. We didn’t have to discuss tempos or anything. We just clicked into it.
If there’s one song that had to sound settled and assured, it would be ‘Wishing Stone’. There’s a line on it, “Love you more than my need to roam,” that made me think about your relationship to home, which is something that ‘In a Bungalow’ also touches on.
CGW: I’ve always had such a sense of home, luckily. It’s the thing I’m most grateful for, whether that home was in Saint Louis with my parents or in Chicago at the time in the apartment that I wrote that in. Thinking of people as home, and that being a love song, thinking of Spencer, thinking of very close friends who are soulmates to me. I’m never going to leave it, is kind of how I feel. Whatever happens, no matter how difficult life gets or difficult I get – it’s no question.
ST: I like that the line you pointed out acknowledges that both things exist, the need to roam and your love for someone. You can end up automatically thinking that any presence of one or the other means the other must cease existing, and it’s not really about one completely overtaking the other; they both exist, whether you like it or not. It strikes me as way more productive and honest to just answer the question of, where’s the balance? Which one is winning right now? Or, how do we navigate both of them without pretending like I’m all of a sudden an incurious or stationary person?
Can you tell me more about that need to roam?
CGW: I think it’s more just the idea of exploration of life that’s so broad, but it’s not necessarily about travel. I mean, so much of the record is about road tripping and being on the actual road. But I think it’s more so the need to continue to question and evaluate yourself in life, having a roaming brain, rather than the literal sense of, “I need to go to another state” or whatever it may be. In my daily life, I love being home. I’m the biggest homebody. I’m not like, “I gotta get out and travel.” So I think that line is more about self-investigation, an idea of always being curious to what else is out there. Not in a romantic sense, but whatever that may be – if it’s a conversation with someone on the corner, reading a new book, trying to listen to a different genre of music. An idea of being forever evolving and forever changing as a person.
I think the title of the album also frames it around that, in a way, and it’s also about the transition from childhood to adulthood. Which inevitably positions it in that blurry age of adolescence, like a fever dream that keeps hanging on. I feel like you home in on that intensity of feeling on ‘Seventeen’.
CGW: Definitely. When I wrote ‘Seventeen’, that was the subject. Trying to write that feeling was very much what I was trying to do, whether that was in fiction writing or at that point in song. And, yeah, fever dream is a very good way to describe it. It’s this emotional intensity that really only exists at that point in your life where everything is a big deal. I think it is special to hang on to that feeling and to hone in on it into adulthood, and it’s something that I still try and hold on to. Not necessarily the angst or the hormonalness of it, but just letting yourself feel like things are big deals. Being able to focus on your emotions and really feel intensely about things, I think, is important no matter what age you are. Obviously, as you go through that and move past it literally, hormonally, and grow as a person, things aren’t as big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. But I think being able to not lose that part of yourself that really loved or felt intensely or had really strong opinions on things is important. I really have always loved coming-of-age novels and things that focus on that aspect. And I think coming of age also really involves early twenties – it’s not just being 18. It’s past that, too, because there’s so much growth that happens between 20 and 25 or 27 or whatever it may be.
One thing that makes this perspective come across on the record is that it sounds comfortable in its vulnerability. How much do you feel like that was baked into the songs? Or was it something that also came with how they were developed collaboratively?
CGW: Probably both. It’s not something I’m really thinking about when I’m writing. I think it probably comes out because that’s how I live my life. The vulnerability is baked in – the little bit of emotional discomfort is always there, and I’m always willing to talk about that and let that be at the forefront. So I think when it comes to songwriting, of course it’s coming out that way. Musically, I think that the vulnerability of the way the songs sound speaks to playing with a band that gets what the songs mean and what they’re supposed to sound like. Not coming to them with a heavy hand or whatever it may be.
ST: Everybody in the group kind of shares some similar version of your sensitivity, I think.
CGW: Oh, yeah.
ST: It’s funny. I feel like sometimes if somebody was a fly on the wall in the practice room with us or the van or something, they would probably laugh at how carefully we’re navigating each other’s feelings. At least among the boys, it’s like the opposite of horse playing or shitting on each other and being mean to each other. There’s a whole lot of care and, in a similar fashion to Casey, being heavily invested in other people’s well-being and also in their perceptions.
Do you feel like it’s different when a song is involved? Does the feeling become more precious in a way?
CGW: I think it’s very much the same. When I bring a song to the table, I’m not super precious about it besides maybe the lyrics. But I am really open to however it comes through. I don’t think that there’s this, like, “Here’s this fragile piece of glass that we all have to be careful holding that I’ve brought to the table.” It’s definitely more like a piece of clay that has its original form, but everyone’s hands can be on it, and we can figure out what it is. The sensitivity and the emotion is really all of us working together on it rather than bringing this really fragile, structured, intense thing that can’t be changed to the table.
ST: I feel like there’s two different versions of angst, or maybe you shouldn’t use the same word for both of them. But there’s apathetic, dark, really destructive angst, and then there’s angst from caring too much or so much. And sometimes I feel like when people have, I think rightly, pointed out that there’s some angst in the material on the album, sometimes I’ve been confused because I’ve been like, there’s zero apathy. There’s zero dejectedness or anything I’d associate with a teenager who is angry and lost motivation. But in the end, it is accurate to say there’s angst, and I think that’s because it’s this other form that is more related to fear of loss or righteous indignation, a whole range of emotions and reactions that you can rightly call angsty, but have nothing to do with kind of nihilist, adolescent image that that word sometimes leads me to think of.
Maybe it’s the way the record is sequenced, but I feel like it eases you into the more personal, sincere songs by opening with more character-focused, observational ones, at least until ‘Seventeen’.
CGW: That’s very interesting. I haven’t ever thought of it that way. For me, all the songs are very autobiographical. But yeah, that is true. I mean, it was not intentional in the way it’s sequenced – I think we sequenced it mostly sonically and not thinking about it too hard.
ST: But that is interesting, how a song like ‘Nora’ is autobiographical, but through someone else technically being the protagonist.
CGW: And same with, yeah, ‘Buick Door’ and ‘Kentucky Cave’. That’s super true. I hadn’t really thought about it.
Similar to what Spencer was saying about angst, there’s also a feeling of nostalgia, though that doesn’t feel like the word – I love the line in ‘In a Bungalow’ about how you could “stand to regress.” It’s a feeling you kind of take pleasure in.
CGW: Oh, yeah. The song ‘Bungalow’ is so much about people from my hometown and thinking about them, this feeling of being glad not to be them and not being in their life anymore – but also having this fantasy of going back to it and, like, relishing it. Kind of feeling above it, but at the same time, knowing that I’m not. I think it’s a feeling everyone can relate to, whether that’s going back to a hometown friend or going back to an ex and having a drink or whatever. You’re regressing, but also, it feels good. [laughs] It feels good to do that because you’re indulging part of yourself that has maybe fantasies about showing them how much better you are now or how much you’ve grown. It’s totally rooted in a daydream that a lot of people have of going back to things that have happened as your present day self.
I know the vocals were recorded later along with some of the additional instrumentation. Did having that separation from the initial part of the process make you feel nervous?
CGW: I don’t think there was a feeling of anxiety. I had never tried vocals before when we did it, but I also never felt too precious about it. It was kind of like, “These songs are going to sound however they’re going to sound. I’m not trying to perfect my voice.” It’s mainly just about getting the emotion across when I was singing it. It just felt good to lay down those vocal tracks over what was already a really good base of the record, and I don’t think that we spent too much painful time on any one track. We just got through it in multiple sessions. Maybe I had some worry about how my voice would sound recorded, because it’s not like I’ve ever practised or had any sort of professional experience with my voice.
Spencer, when you’re mixing the record, did you have any interactions with the band? How did you feel about the way it was shaping up?
ST: It was just between me and Casey. We didn’t involve anybody else. The main job was playing traffic cop between the auxiliary instruments that we had added after onto the basics – basically, weaving the fiddle with the pedal steel, which Scott and Max would have done naturally as musicians if they had performed at the same time. But because we collected many ideas from them in a harvesting session separately, we had to sculpt an arrangement out of those instruments and also the piano and organ. There was some technical thinking like that, but we did in a couple of periods of one week of intense focus and then putting it in the drawer for a long time. Every time we would come back to it, it was fresh again. I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of people who have similar marinating processes. But all along the way, we wanted to preserve the naturalness, and we wanted to have a pretty light touch. Just make it sound like a record that we would be excited to find and put on, and keeping Casey’s voice at the forefront of all of it.
Casey, did this batch of songs affect the way you write now?
CGW: I think I’m still writing in a very similar way. Some of the songs that we’ve now written for what’s the next record, Spencer and I have written them together. But a lot of it is coming from a journal entry or an idea still, or a character that I imagine in my mind. I don’t think that has really changed at all. I might be thinking more about it sonically now, how it’s gonna sound as a full group and on a record and what we can do with it. Whereas before, I was really focused on just the guitar and voice. But I still think that the most important thing in a song is, always, keep it a bit simple and have the message come across.
How does co-writing feel at the moment?
CGW: We really have a really good way of songwriting together where it’s just like a conversation. I feel like I come at it with an idea of how it should sound sonically or what the story is about, and we’re able to sit and think about what the words are that need to be in that song or what the chords are, what the feeling is, what the melody is, and just bang it out together. There’s not really any hardship in it.
ST: I feel like I’ve been, particularly with lyrics and melody, able to help in a way that I’ve never been able to help in other collaborations because Casey provides such clear prompts and structures. Whereas writing by myself, trying to write a song completely by myself, you can be paralyzed by the unlimited potential. But with Casey, at least one version of the process that happens often is that you set up these kinds of guide rails or show where the holes are.
Could you share one thing that’s currently inspiring you about each other, musically or personally?
ST: That’s really nice.
CGW: Yeah, that’s sweet. I think for me, it’s Spencer’s willingness, and having the tenacity, to hop into situations with different bands and go on the road. To be comfortable and figure out how to be comfortable, and be flexible while still very much being himself and not ever faltering on that, is something that I’m figuring out how to do and learning how to do and now going to be put in situations where I need to do it. I’m definitely looking up to him and thinking about how he does it, and that it’s okay to be flexible but remain yourself.
ST: There are a lot of things about you that inspire me all the time, but the one that comes to mind right now is the willingness to see goodness in other people. I think that can be a scary concept, because it can make you sound like somebody’s easily taken advantage of or naive to badness, but it is not that at all. Being someone prone to worry and self-doubt, and being around someone who’s not prone to finding issues where there are none, or needless judgment – it gives me personally a lot of confidence, but I know it doesn’t just apply to me. This is why Casey’s relationships are strong with her family and with other friends. To put it in corny terms, I think it’s part of how she elevates people. I don’t know if it’s weird to say an inspiring aspect is something that has so much to do with other people, but I think it’s admirable and generous.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Case Oats’ Last Missouri Exit is out August 22 via Merge.
