Case Oats – Last Missouri Exit
Case Oats—the Chicago-based outfit of Casey Gomez Walker (lead vocals, acoustic guitar), Spencer Tweedy (drums), Max Subar (guitar, pedal steel), Scott Daniel (fiddle), and Jason Ashworth (bass)—announce their debut album Last Missouri Exit, out August 22nd via Merge Records, and release the lead single and video, “Bitter Root Lake.”
Last Missouri Exit is a remarkably assured record, capturing a transitional time for Gomez Walker. On the drive north from Casey’s Missouri hometown to Chicago, the sign before the Illinois border reads, in part, “Last Missouri Exit.” Crossing it 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 2018, Case Oats was something of a nebulous idea. Casey had played in bands before, and there was one self-released Case Oats single, but it wasn’t a band until an out-of-town friend asked if she 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.”
The throughline from the band’s 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.” “It was intentionally bare-bones,” says Tweedy, who engineered the session with Ashworth and Subar. “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.”
Following previous single “Seventeen,” dubbed a “Song You Need to Know” by Rolling Stone, “Bitter Root Lake” holds the weight of a confessional poem and the ease of a conversation between friends. Casey’s inspiration for this song came from the 1982 true-crime case of a Canadian couple that ran away in a rental plane, crashing into Little Bitterroot Lake in Montana, and the man abandoning his girlfriend. “This story is dark, but I feel like it could happen to anyone in love. The dream gets the best of you, and suddenly you end up in an awful situation. It’s about the aermath where it all went wrong, and longing for the road in which it went right.”
Today, they announce a number of album release shows in New York, Toronto, and Chicago taking place this summer. Additionally, the band will play two festivals: Out of Space in Evanston and Americana Music Festival.
Case Oats Tour Dates:
Thu. July 24 – Sun. July 27 – Evanston, IL @ Out of Space
Tue. Aug. 19 – New York, NY @ Nightclub 101 %
Wed. Aug. 20 – Toronto, ON @ The Drake %
Fri. Aug. 22 – Chicago, IL @ The Hideout %
Wed. Sept. 17 – Wed. Sept. 24 – Nashville, TN @ Americana Music Festival
% Album Release Show
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