Case Oats started as a friendship, not a plan — Casey Walker was a writer struggling to place her short stories and poems when she met Spencer Tweedy, a drummer who'd played with Joan Shelley, Norah Jones, and his father Jeff Tweedy's other bands.
He encouraged her to try songwriting instead, and the band grew out of that collaboration once guitarist Max Subar, bassist Jason Ashworth, and fiddler Scott Daniel joined in.
Last Missouri Exit, their debut album, came out on Merge Records in August 2025, produced and mixed by Tweedy, who also co-wrote eight of its songs with Walker — an alt-country record that came out of a poet finding a different form almost by accident.