We’re New Here – Case Oats

“I wanted to write a coming-of-age novel and I made an album instead,” says Casey Walker, fulcrum of Chicago’s lustrous alt.country newcomers Case Oats. Their upcoming debut Last Missouri Exit is certainly steeped in confessional Midwest storytelling. A creative writing graduate, Walker crafts vivid portraits of youthful abandon and struggle, of deadbeat exes (and the exes they went back to), and of the darkness that can engulf her homeland landscapes.

“Songs are born out of a short story or a poem,” she says, perched on a stool in a Notting Hill bar, ahead of an in-store performance at Rough Trade West with bandmate Spencer Tweedy. “A lot of times when I sit down to write a song, I have a scene, a character or a piece of dialogue, and that’s what I will come to first.”

Messing around in a garage-rock band after graduating from Columbia, in 2018 Walker ran into Chicago scene mainstay Tweedy – son of Wilco’s Jeff, and drummer in numerous local acts – and the pair recorded a single track, “Bluff”, at his home studio. Its warm collage of bittersweet relationship memories instantly crystalised the crux of her songwriting. “Having fondness for people who aren’t right for you or who have wronged you and hurt you – that is a lot of what I went through in my early twenties.”

Putting the track online as Case Oats, Walker soon found her non-existent band getting offers for local shows. Spurred into action, within a few months she’d completed an album’s worth of material and assembled a group from members of Chicago’s indie-rock ‘Wrecking Crew’: fiddle player Scott Daniel, guitarist Max Subar and bassist Jason Ashworth, some of whom had previously played with her at a Creedence Clearwater Revival covers night on Halloween. “Casey was in John Fogerty drag,” Tweedy chuckles. “There’s a photo of that…”

In Subar and Ashworth’s Big Pink-style basement – “It was cosy enough, but still a basement,” Tweedy recalls. “Corners of it smelled bad” – they cut most of Last Missouri Exit in two days, in thrall to Gillian Welch, Doug Sahm and Neil Young. Tweedy’s experience of recording in the Wilco loft proved invaluable: “At the end of the day, it’s an improvised space made out of an industrial warehouse, so I was steeped in that already.”

These conditions delivered them a record of dusky, intimate, pure-malt country drenched in wistful and reflective teen-era autobiography. The minutiae of the post-relationship mind-churn is refreshingly dissected. “In The Bungalow” revels in the universal fantasy of old partners withering away without us, while “Nora” is “a love song for your lover’s ex” who hung around and eventually got him back. And the breezy “Seventeen” revisits the angst and antics of teenagehood. “You can look back at high school and be like, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful and great and fun’, but it wasn’t,” says Walker. “It was painful and hard, and I’m glad that I’m not there any more.”

The record’s “most painful” song, “Kentucky Cave” describes a trip to Mammoth Cave with a boyfriend suffering paranoid religious delusions. “I sat down and wrote that song like an expulsion,” Walker admits. “It was a very healing thing for me”. The haunting tale of “Bitter Root Lake” – in which a teenage couple steal a plane and crash it into the titular lake, killing the girlfriend – is drawn from a podcast rather than Walker’s own experience, but it’s still a true story: “Even the line about the kids who found her body and they thought it was a sleeping woman.”

Her cathartic sonic novel complete, Walker is already plotting out a sequel. “Plenty of life has been lived in the time in between,” Tweedy says, as Walker nods along: “I’m ready to write.”

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