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rowing up in small-town Missouri in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Casey Gomez Walker was an indie kid, searching out the lyrics to her favorite songs by the Shins and LCD Soundsystem, scrolling through posts on Tumblr, and dreaming of a wider world. That was enough to make her stand out as different in a culturally conservative environment where the high school football team was the biggest thing in town. “Literally, the quarterback started a rumor that I worshiped the devil, which is truly hilarious, because I looked like I do now,” she says, laughing, over Zoom from her home in Chicago. “It’s not like I was wearing dark makeup or anything. I just wasn’t religious and sometimes wore black.”
In fact, she wasn’t a Satanist, nor even a goth — just an artistic spirit looking for the right place to flourish. That feeling of adolescent yearning and stubborn hope runs all through the songs on Last Missouri Exit, the debut LP from Gomez Walker’s band, Case Oats. Released recently on Merge Records, it’s a winning set of alt-country and folk songs with warm melodies, novelistic verses, and unassuming vocals that recall Daniel Johnston and Kimya Dawson. That humble but effective combination made Case Oats a word-of-mouth success at this past spring’s SXSW, and if you catch one of their shows this fall, you’ll very likely walk out a fan.
After getting through high school the best she could, playing trumpet in the marching band and writing opinion articles for the school newspaper, Gomez Walker moved to Chicago at age 18. “I was glad to leave,” she says. She hasn’t been back to her hometown since, though she often visits her family in St. Louis, where they now live.
Working toward a creative writing degree at Columbia College Chicago, a small school with an emphasis on the arts, Gomez Walker applied herself to completing an “uncomfortable coming-of-age novel,” stockpiling scenes and imagery. Still, she didn’t think of herself as a songwriter. That didn’t happen until after she graduated college in 2016 and found herself surrounded by DIY bands in the city. “One of my friends was like, ‘You should buy an electric guitar,’” she says. “That was my first try at that. And it got easier from there.”
Case Oats — the name comes from an old screen name chosen in tribute to her late pet hamster — started two years later, after Gomez Walker connected with her drummer, co-writer, producer, and fiancé, Spencer Tweedy. He’s an accomplished indie musician in his own right, having recorded and toured extensively with his father, Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, as well as kindred spirits like Waxahatchee. (That’s him behind the kit on their excellent 2024 album Tigers Blood, which we named one of the year’s best, as well as on his dad’s superb upcoming triple LP, Twilight Override.)
After initially corresponding online (“Casey slid into my DMs,” he confides), the two of them quickly became partners in both music and life. Tweedy, joining the Zoom from Oregon in between Waxahatchee tour stops, recalls how an early draft of the song “Bluff” caught his interest right away: “I just thought that there was something very tender about it, and I was excited and thrilled by the unusualness of the opening line,” he says. “‘Sorry I talked about hockey too much’ — I’m like, ‘Who the fuck writes that?’”
Case Oats in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, from left: Scott Daniel, Max Subar, Casey Gomez Walker, Spencer Tweedy, Jason Ashworth
Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
They began playing shows at small clubs around Chicago, roping in friends to round out the band. Guitarist and pedal steel player Max Subar and bass player Jason Ashworth joined Case Oats after being recruited for a Halloween performance as Creedence Clearwater Revival. “We all wore wigs, and Spencer drummed with his shirt off for the first time ever,” Gomez Walker recalls. “We did ‘Down on the Corner,’ ‘Hey Tonight,’ ‘Fortunate Son’ — all of the classics.” After gathering in Subar and Ashworth’s basement to get the basic drum, bass, and guitar tracks for Last Missouri Exit, they developed the album’s sound further with Scott Daniel on fiddle and Nolan Chin on piano and organ.
“Casey and I harvested a bunch of really stellar performances from each of those players,” Tweedy says, citing Neil Young, Gillian Welch, and Songs: Ohia as reference points they kept in mind. “The overall goal was to be unvarnished. The word ‘plain’ has negative connotations, but I don’t feel that way. I think plain can be a good thing if it means that the substance rises. Keep it simple, that was the goal.”
That homespun sound lets Gomez Walker’s striking vocals stay center stage. On “Bitter Root Lake,” she riffs on a true-crime story she heard about on an episode of Dateline: The tale of a Canadian teenager who allegedly stole a plane in 1982 and flew into the U.S. with his girlfriend, and the fatal crash that followed. “It’s a story of guilt and love, and also the feeling of being 17 and thinking you can get away with literally anything,” she says. “I was like, ‘I gotta write a song about this.’”
The other songs on Last Missouri Exit are more firmly rooted in Gomez Walker’s own memories. She describes opening track “Buick Door” as being about mama’s boys “who, their whole life, get away with shit,” and the insistently catchy “Nora” as being dedicated to “your ex’s future girlfriend.”
The sweet declaration called “Wishing Stone” is another highlight. “I would say it’s the only true love song on the record,” Gomez Walker says. “A lot about Spencer, a lot of stuff that’s somewhat fictional. It’s a picture to me of what it feels like to be really in love and to be able to continue loving despite flaws and weirdness.”
Gomez Walker, 30, and Tweedy, 29, recently announced their engagement, and they’re currently planning a wedding for next fall. In the meantime, they’re getting ready to share the music they’ve made with more people, including shows at Americana Fest in Nashville this weekend and a string of opening dates for Lucius and Superchunk in the fall.
At press time, they still needed to settle on a theme for this year’s Case Oats Halloween show. It’s become a tradition for the band, who perform as a different act each October at the Chicago venue where Gomez Walker tends bar. “The Replacements were the highlight, for sure,” Tweedy says to her. “You were a really mean Paul Westerberg.” This year, they’ve been talking about taking the stage as Counting Crows.
“I don’t know if we can convince everybody to do that,” Gomez Walker says. “But there’s plenty of other ground to cover in rock & roll.”
