by Rohan Press (rohanpress@gmail.com)
“There’s nothing wrong with missing your friends,” Casey Walker reminds us—consoles us. Even when you’ve changed, or they’ve changed; even when you’ve been hurt, or when you’ve hurt them; even when you know that there’s still a lot of shit to work through. That’s what Case Oats’ new album, Last Missouri Exit, a record which has been so many years in the making, and which is finally coming out on Merge, comes down to what it means to hold on to others and to oneself despite the flaws and fallibilities and changes to which we’re all subject. “Part of the way I am and the way I function is being loyal and accepting people and giving grace,” she told me during our phone conversation. And it’s that absolutely earnest posture of acceptance that makes Walker’s patient, warm indie-country glow.
Over the course of our half-hour conversation—me, in my half-moved-out-of apartment; Walker, wandering through a “weird, small town in Wisconsin”—that’s what we kept on returning to: missing our friends. It turns out we both have friends scattered across the country, friends lost in the blue of distance, friends we never want to let go. Her album title, Last Missouri Exit, evokes that fulcrum point between Missouri, where she grew up, and where many of her friends and family still remain, and Illinois, where she has since made a new life for herself. Maybe, sometimes, leaving a place you love—seeing the sign for the last Missouri exit as you cross the state line—is when that place becomes most dear to you.
Walker is as much a writer as a songwriter, and she moves between playful, macabre storytelling (“Bitter Root Lake”) and wistful, crushing introspection (“In a Bungalow,” “Seventeen,” “Tennessee”) with ease. Perhaps most emotionally graceful is the song “Nora,” where Walker addresses the old girlfriend of an ex-boyfriend (an old flame to whom he ended up returning), with loving recognition, rather than bitterness: “Nora, Nora, Nora” she warbles across the chorus, “I’m glad you are here now.”
It’s a special thing when a song, like “Nora,” makes you rub your eyes and look at the world a little differently, with a little more softness. Maybe, sometimes, to borrow the words of the music writer Rob Sheffield, we really can choose to be kind people even in an unkind world. Talking with Walker, and dwelling with her music, made that kind of life feel a little closer.
After all, it is okay to miss your friends; it is okay to feel that ache, a little, across all the state lines that separate us—it is okay, because it’s part of a deeper love. “I’m definitely an advocate for letting yourself feel everything,” she told me. “And just truly being able to get through all the feelings, instead of suppressing them, or doing any of that, and just really letting it ‘bleed out,’ for lack of a better phrasing.” Here, Walker is referencing a line we both kept on returning to a couplet where she addresses a former high school classmate with a kind of pensive, and yet wide-eyed, tenderness: “I’d love to be your friend: / bleed out and finally mend.” I love that line so much because I think it exposes a sensibility that we both share: a belief in being porous to others, choosing vulnerability, choosing to let someone in, even and especially when it isn’t always simple or easy. As we pulled and pushed our way through our conversation, I think we both came to acknowledge that art has everything to do with this porousness. Maybe what it all comes down to is simply community. Lost and found and enduring.
Case Oats by Braedan Long
Rohan Press: I really wanted to talk about specifically the song “In a Bungalow,” which has come to be a really special song to me. That last line where you say, “I’d like to be your friend: / bleed out and finally mend.” I think there’s so much emotional complexity there.
Casey Walker: It’s very genuine. The song itself is kind of a take away, talking about high school friends and knowing that they’ve moved on and that you’ve moved on—and I think I wrote that completely earnestly, thinking about one of my high school friends that was in a completely different space back then—and knowing that life didn’t go exactly as we both hoped, maybe, but still wanting to be their friend, and still making space for them and knowing that it’s okay.
RP: I think it’s so hard, but so emotionally mature, when you’re able to reach that point. I think the song “Nora,” to me, is another really powerful example of that, where you take someone who, maybe conventionally, society expects you to have judgment or resentment for, and you say, No—I love you. Like, “I’m glad you’re here now.” To flip that on its head, to me, is so moving.
CW: Thank you. Yeah, I think with “Nora,” it’s such a trope in media, a lot of books and shows, that the woman is mad at the other woman, and that is very much what we see. It’s like, you picture someone finding the cheater and, getting mad at the woman instead of the man, or whatever. But I think, for me, my lived experience of that situation is just that I wasn’t mad. You know, in the moment, I was hurt, obviously, and went through a lot of emotions, but truly, by the time that relationship was over, and I was reflecting on it, and he was back together with Nora, I was grateful. I was completely grateful, and I would see her out, and instead of ever feeling, like, this bitch, or whatever, I was really feeling just grateful that she existed, and that she kind of rescued me from what was a painful circumstance.
RP: To me that’s just a living example of “bleed out and finally mend.” Because it might be painful, but feeling those feelings is really important, and maybe something more mature can actually come out of that.
CW: Yeah, I’m definitely an advocate for letting yourself feel everything. And just truly being able to get through all the feelings, instead of suppressing them, or doing any of that, and just really letting it “bleed out,” for lack of a better phrasing.
RP: I wanted to really hear more from you about the pivot you’ve made in your creative life, between creative writing and songwriting.
CW: Totally! I used to be so terrible at writing songs. But, you know, all of my favorite writers were songwriters. I looked up lyrics and would print them out and everything; I was so obsessed with how lyrics were written, but never thought it was something that I would do. And I guess that was because I didn’t really get to play an instrument. I tried to play guitar earlier in life, and just kind of gave up on it.
I went to college for creative writing. My goal, and it’s still my goal, is to write a novel. I really love fiction writing, and I love prose so much. But I kind of, at the end of college, towards the end of it, became obsessed with very short-form fiction, and this idea of conveying as much of the story as you can, in as little words as you can—making something really succinct.
And, you know, songs are that, but I wasn’t really thinking of it as that. So I was writing a lot of poetry, and a lot of short-form fiction that I was just kind of sitting on, but didn’t really know what to do with. And then I started playing guitar more when one of my best friends kind of convinced me to buy an electric guitar, because I only had this really shitty acoustic guitar that was so hard to play. And he was like, you just need to buy an electric guitar. So I did. And that kind of opened up stuff for me a little bit.
And I was like, oh, playing guitar maybe isn’t as hard as I thought. And then I kind of started songwriting with him… But it really wasn’t until I met Spencer [Tweedy] I had been kind of working on writing songs myself, but he came at it from the world of, like, anyone can write a song. Of course you can write a song. Of course you can make music. Of course these words belong in a song. And it just kind of gave me that confidence. And also, he had a recording studio at the time. He had a small recording studio in his college town and so we recorded our first track there. And then that just really opened up a world for me of like, this actually makes sense. Like, all of these things that I’ve been trying to write and trying to do, they make sense as a song. And yeah, the joke that I’ve been continually making now is that I was trying to write a novel and actually made an album.
RP: I think when you’re a writer, there’s this myth that you can fall into, of thinking—oh, art is just this solitary expression of myself. I’m bearing my naked soul or whatever. But then I think what maybe you’re saying—and what you’ve realized with songwriting, perhaps—is that, actually, maybe art comes from relationships, from responding to other people and the love you feel for them and the encouragement you feel in that community.
CW: Yeah, I went to Columbia College Chicago for writing, and their writing school, at least at the time, was based in Story Workshop Method, which is very based on feedback from other people, but now, like, in a very critical way. They do something that’s called a recall—so, you’re recalling what you remember from that person’s story, as rooted in traditional oral storytelling. Very hippy dippy, but that’s how I thought of writing. When I was in writing school, sharing the writing and reading stuff out loud was always the most formative part of it. And so, the gradual switch or addition of songwriting into my writing life just made sense—because it’s like, I’m doing it out loud, and it’s still a process of sharing.
You’re so right that it’s based on friendships and utilizing the gifts of your friends and being able to give back to them. Just being in a community and sharing in that sense is totally what making art is about. But yeah, I definitely have always said that writing is so solitary.
Every time I’ve sat down to try and write for like, a novel, all I want to do is write like twenty pages, and then I’m like, who wants to read it? That’s how it feels. So I think that, yeah, I get satisfaction from songwriting, and maybe in a way that I don’t from other types of writing, just because there is so much more sharing and collaboration.
RP: One thing that just inspires me so much about the music I love most is that what’s being represented there is community—a life in the name of friends and community. Just saying, “hey, I’m going to prioritize these people,” and we’re going to tour and hang out together. I know it’s not always so romantic, but nonetheless.
CW: Definitely. Yeah, totally. I’m a total true romantic about it, too. Just being with your friends—that shit’s magic to me. And to be able to lead a life formed around that is really cool.
RP: We talked a lot about these complex relationships with other people, and like you said, being loyal to people who are maybe flawed and recognizing flaws in yourself and loving through those flaws. But then also, you’ve talked about this album as about being true to yourself, too, and finding that autonomy. And I love maybe thinking about how there’s, like, an internal relationship between dependence and independence—like, you recognize that through acknowledging how we’re dependent on others, through the complex relationships we have with them, we also can find ourselves.
CW: Definitely. Most of these songs are written about things that happened in my early 20s and teenage years, just really painfully trying to figure things out. I think that what I didn’t know at the time is that part of the way I am and the way I function is being loyal and accepting people and giving grace. And, yeah, both things exist together, because I was able to find myself through those painfully hard relationships—a lot of which do not exist in my life anymore, but which I do still feel fondly about.
I think that it’s a fucking trip to figure out who you are. And I don’t think anyone’s ever done with that. I’m a lot further removed from the songs at the time they happened or when I wrote them, even. It’s just a process of self-discovery, always.
RP: The last theme I would be really curious to hear a little bit more about, is this nebulous question of “home” that’s posed by the album title—Last Missouri Exit. This slippage between Missouri and Illinois… And what it means to find home at a distance from home… And maybe this idea of recognizing what home means only when you’ve left it. Do you think making this album, writing this album, inflected your understanding of what home means for you? Do you feel like that question has evolved for you throughout this process?
CW: You know, I don’t know if it’s really evolved, so much as it’s made my feeling more concrete. Like, the cheesy answer is home is where my family is and where my friends are. And, like, you could have multiple homes. Like, home is still St. Louis to me: that’s where my parents are, that’s where so many memories are. But home is also very much Chicago at this point. I’ve been here for 12 years. And, you know, home is sometimes Michigan. Sometimes, it’s Wisconsin. It’s, like, these places where we can deeply spend time with friends and family and those that we love and our chosen family. And just experience that and experience each other—that’s what home is to me. But I don’t have a true definition of it. I don’t.
I am a homebody. I love being home. I really do. And I’ve always been like that since I was a kid. I like going on vacation, but I’m not really, like, a huge explorer in a way, because I like to get home and to feel grounded. And I think anywhere where I can feel totally grounded is what makes me most comfortable.
RP: I think that feels wise. I agree with you that “home,” I don’t think, is ever a settled or easy question.
CW: Yeah, and I have my closest friend, and other friends, who are across the country. And so, what’s that mean? I have no answer. I’m just waiting for someone to invent teleportation! I’m ready to be able to go quickly between places.
RP: Haha, perhaps! Although, I mean, I’m old-school in the fact that I think, you know, that distance and time are good things. And that when humans try to conquer distance and time is when we kind of fuck things up.
CW: Yeah, you’re right, totally. We need the distance and time to be able to process things.
RP: And I think maybe art as well comes from that distance that we experience, you know, and trying to find a way to bridge it in some way.
CW: Yes. Yeah, this album took a really long time to make. And it’s coming out many years after I first started it. But I think that it couldn’t have come out any earlier. It needed to exist and mature—and I almost needed distance, and we needed to finish it when we were older.
RP: I like that idea of waiting for the right moment for you to be almost ready for the album, in some sense.
CW: Yeah, and, you know, it wasn’t purely intentional. We weren’t like, we’re going to sit on this. It just took a long time because we did it all ourselves.