Come out to see Casey Reeves play and you’ll feel at home. The Missouri-born singer-songwriter exudes ease and familiarity, whether playing a large venue with a full backing band, or a local hot-spot with just a stack of instruments and a looping station onstage. (Watching Reeves loop percussion, guitar, vocals, and harmonica live will leave you awestruck – and he makes it seem so easy!). That sense of familiarity equally describes his songwriting. Reeves has a way of turning phrases that, despite their originality, seem like something you’ve known before. There’s a hint of nostalgia in his work; he has an evident appreciation for folk-rock contemporaries Wilco and The Avett Brothers, but also for late century folk standards like Bob Dylan and even the age-old hymns he grew up singing. His first solo album, In Between Oceans, was both a nod to his Midwestern roots and a forward-looking project, featuring skilled musicians from all over Missouri. Reeves writes songs that are personal stories but somehow seem to refer to each listener’s own history. “Stay,” for example (from In Between Oceans), is a ballad describing his parents’ divorce during his early childhood. It brilliantly and unpretentiously describes a young child’s attempts to understand his parents’ experience of the change, and what they must be feeling. We get Reeves’ grown-up poeticism, and still somehow don’t lose the childlike sweetness of the speaker in the song. “Drive All Day” (also from In Between Oceans), a real hit at live shows, buoyantly captures the rural, Midwestern teenager’s answer to the question, “What is there to do around here?” It describes acceptance of one’s setting, and the bouncing guitar and ringing harmonies of the song make you want to roll down your car window and nod along. “The Game,” a treasure of Reeves’s New Locomotive EP, describes the disintegration of a relationship: the couple feels the weight of complacency and repetition, which is echoed in the structure and rhythm of the song. This masterfully crafted song gives his listener an almost physical sense of the inevitability of the parting. The stories told in the songs of In Between Oceans and New Locomotive EP vary from classic lost love, to Grandma’s passing away, to skipping stones on a country river. What they offer in common is a thoughtful combination of words and music and the sense that we all somehow belong where we are. Reeves knows his roots, and he knows how to use what he knows.