MERGE RECORDS Last Missouri Exit

In 2018, Case Oats was something of a nebulous idea. Its bandleader, Casey Gomez Walker, had played in bands before, and Case Oats had a self-released single to its name, but it wasn’t a band until an out-of-town friend asked her if Case Oats could headline a show in Chicago. She bluffed—yes, she had a band, yes, they were ready to play a show—and buckled down to make good. “It was a bit delusional of me,” she says, “but there’s something to be said about being a bit delusional.” Last Missouri Exit, the debut album by Case Oats, is a remarkably assured record, the band—Spencer Tweedy (drums), Max Subar (guitar, pedal steel), Jason Ashworth (bass), Scott Daniel (fiddle), and Nolan Chin (piano, organ)—gelling around Gomez Walker’s voice and guitar. Last Missouri Exit is a collection of sharply drawn character studies, Gomez Walker’s background in creative writing expressing itself in wry observation and a disarmingly easy sense of the lyric, the profound and profane tumbling out of songs like “Bitter Root Lake” with the weight of a confessional poem and the ease of a conversation between friends. The throughline from Case Oats’ first show to their debut album is trust, in the songs and in their players. Resonating from the messiest chambers of the heart, Last Missouri Exit is a bruised affair, the band swelling around Gomez Walker as she describes coming of age in terms of being loyal to desperately flawed people and eventually, with some distance from home, being true to herself. The songs found their shape live, and initial recordings took place, as Gomez Walker recalls, “Big Pink-style,” in the basement of a house shared by Ashworth, Subar, and touring member Chet Zenor. “We tracked these songs over three hot August days with our friends, just trying to capture the energy that existed between us.” “It was intentionally bare-bones,” says Tweedy, who engineered the session with Ashworth and Subar and produced the album. “We brought just enough stuff to the basement to be able to record. We were lucky to have played a lot of shows in the months leading up to the session, so we just played like we had been playing, no preciousness.” That initial basement session is the home in which Last Missouri Exit grew up, serving both as place of origin and destination as Gomez Walker and Tweedy recorded the vocals in separate sessions at home. Lyrics that read as wincingly true—“Your brother was the golden boy and you were your mother’s pup / The safety of her guiding arms kept you from fucking up” goes one couplet from “Buick Door”—fully bloom to life in the light of that attention, steeled by the distance between Gomez Walker and the inciting incidents of her songs. Her voice is confident and tender, catching the thrill of a drum fill or the aching expanse of pedal steel and channeling the momentum into the hopes and heartaches of small-town Midwestern life. On the drive north on the freeway to Chicago from Gomez Walker’s hometown, the sign just before the Illinois border reads, in part, “Last Missouri Exit.” It is a point on the map, and, for her, a point of no return. Crossing it one day signaled the end of her childhood and the beginning of the rest of her life. The album is a hinge between those two states, its pangs of homesickness overlapping with the thrill of breaking for the horizon. “In a Bungalow” regards that overlap in golden-hour light, a song whose keen longing for home—its sweet springs and slow days and old friends—is only possible because she left a place that once felt like the center of the universe. If Last Missouri Exit is a coming-of-age album, that’s because its concerns are growth and perspective, and it was made by a band already living beyond the horizon the album is named for. It is an album that longs to be listened to while one watches the sun set from their porch swing, but its wistful, idyllic take on the Midwest isn’t nostalgia for the past—it’s what Case Oats conjured in the basement one summer on an ad-hoc rig, a document of a band that grew together around these songs at a newfound peak of their collaborative powers. What they’ve made is warm and inviting, an album that reveals itself on first spin and grows deeper with each listen. This is their introduction; one wonders at what else their horizon holds.