As the saying goes, you can’t go home again. Even if your childhood home is still physically intact, there comes a time when the place you once knew becomes irretrievable. For writer-turned-singer-songwriter Casey Gomez Walker, home is actually a place she returns to often in her prose and her music.
The St. Louis exurb of Gomez Walker’s youth casts quite the shadow over “Last Missouri Exit,” her 2025 debut album as the focal point of the band Case Oats. A modernist country-folk outfit she assembled around her songs with her creative and life partner Spencer Tweedy, Case Oats will open for Tweedy’s dad, Wilco bandleader Jeff Tweedy, when he headlines a solo performance at the Rochester Institute of Technology on Friday, Oct. 23.
“I see my parents all the time, but I don’t go back to where I grew up,” Gomez Walker said. “I think some places exist for us as just a (moment). It exists there, and you can’t go back. But it exists in my memory.”
In the near-decade since Gomez Walker moved to Chicago at age 18 to pursue a writing degree at Columbia College, she’s made the drive many times from Chicago to St. Louis, where her parents now reside. On each drive back from visiting with them, she passes a sign on Interstate 64 that reads “Last Missouri Exit” — a phrase that, for her, eventually came to symbolize the inexorable passage into adulthood.
Fittingly, Gomez Walker’s recollections pervade the songs. Still, several characters from Gomez Walker’s short stories managed to follow her from the page into the music as well. Often, it’s hard to tell who’s who.
On album opener “Buick Door,” Case Oats fiddle player Scott Daniel sets a mournful tone as the band drags the cadence so it falls somewhere between a waltz and a dirge. Gomez Walker sings to an unnamed former companion: Your brother was the golden boy and you were your mother’s pup / The safety of her guarding arms kept you from fucking up.
In remarkably spare language, Gomez Walker conveys regret, pity, understanding and something approaching but not quite as pointed as resentment. We never learn the name of the character she’s addressing, nor do we learn what became of him.
“So much of what’s in the songs is character-based, but it’s also based on things that happened to me,” she said. “I never think of it as this fictional world that I’m stepping into. It feels pretty real.”
It may be “real,” to her, but in Gomez-Walker’s hands, time bends and warps, creating a dreamlike sensation as the familiar narrative arc of life folds in on itself.
In her recent Substack piece Summer Timeline, for example. Gomez Walker writes: “I watch my mom and her sisters turn into teenagers … They are 16 again, taking too long in the bathroom, scowling at each other across the room while we play board games.”
“I’ve always,” she continued, “operated on yearning and nostalgia.” At times, she and the band evoke a powerful, almost painful sense of yearning for the past. Other times, they opt for a more playful approach.
“Bitter Root Lake,” for example, revisits the true story of a plane crash that took place in 1982, claiming the life of Dianne Babcock, who had eloped with her boyfriend Jerry Ambrozuk. The band establishes a jaunty singalong mood early on. It takes half the song before the listener realizes one of the characters has been killed, yet Gomez Walker’s delivery might have one laughing out loud, even as the music echoes the familiar tropes of a murder ballad.
Throughout, deceptively bare-bones arrangements sometimes support, but often contrast against the words.
Tweedy, who arranged the songs and produced the album, sheds light.
“Casey and I share the idea that you’re not asking yourself the question, ‘How is this supposed to be?’” he said. “It’s actually kind of dangerous (to approach the process that way), because that sounds like a recipe for making something that already exists.”
Gomez Walker, who barely considers herself a musician in the first place, stresses that the album’s tangle of juxtapositions arose intuitively, rather than from any kind of premeditation.
“I think life ought to be more silly and have a tone of like, ‘It’s okay, you can laugh,’” she said. “You can always find something that’s a little bit funny with whatever’s happening around you.”
Case Oats performs as Jeff Tweedy’s opening act at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 23 at RIT Performing Arts Center. More info and tickets here.
Saby Reyes-Kulkarni has called Rochester home since 1990 and has been involved in local music for almost three decades. He is constantly amazed at the depth of music, art and overall creativity that distinguishes our region. His writing has also appeared in “The Democrat & Chronicle,” “Billboard,” “Paste,” “SPIN,” “Pitchfork” and “Smithsonian Magazine.“
