At the height of the pandemic, country music songwriter Nick Gamer, then based in Eugene, almost left the state. “I had to get out of Eugene,” Gamer says. “I had to get out of Oregon.” But plans to move to Nashville fell through, so Gamer drove around Oregon instead, and wrote songs about it. Those songs are collected on Gamer’s new album, Oregoner, out now. 

Gamer, now based in Portland, celebrates the release Sept. 22 at John Henry’s.

Oregoner records Gamer coming to terms with his home, with songs inspired by different geographical locations like the Oregon coast, Willamette Valley and Eastern Oregon, among others.

It features Gamer’s strong, hardworking tenor, backed by guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, pedal steel and various other stringed instruments. Eugene music fans might remember Gamer from indie rock bands like Le Rev. Oregoner is Gamer’s second country album. His first, Suburban Cowboy, came out in 2022.

”As much as I wanted to get out of the state at the time,” Gamer tells Eugene Weekly in a phone call, “Oregon is my home.” And through writing the album, he says, he fell back in love with the state. There’s a tone of acceptance in the music, he says, as Gamer, 35, learned how age can teach you to appreciate what you have.

Though Oregoner is country music through and through, Gamer says his gateway to the genre was country rock, and The Byrds’ album Sweethearts of the Rodeo, in particular. He blends those ’60s rock influences in his sound, with vocal harmonies, a barroom atmosphere and a storytelling style. 

The song “Sidereal” has a psychedelic quality, as a free-ranging guitar solo dissolves into train sounds. That song blends into “Any Neon Sign,” a melancholy late-night ode to loneliness over fingerpicked guitar.

“I don’t do straight country,” Gamer says, with only occasional forays into honky tonk on Oregoner, like the song “Nashville.” Still, Gamer adds, “writing a good country song is deceptively difficult because you’re trying to get across acute sensory ideas and feelings with the most basic language.”

“The Pacific Northwest is not a place known for country,” he continues, but the country that’s produced in the area, he says, including his own, is moodier and more emotionally complex than country music from other places. 

Gamer also sees the influence of ’70s-style outlaw and trucker country in how Northwest country music sounds. “People spend a lot of time driving longer distances,” in the Northwest, he says, which informs the songwriting. 

Lately, everyone from Beyoncé to Lana Del Rey and Post Malone has experimented with the style. Gamer supports getting as many diverse voices in the genre as possible. “I’m, like, ‘hell yeah’ to all of it,” Gamer says. “I want to hear all the variations of it because it’s such a universal genre.”

“Country’s been straight and narrow the whole time,” Gamer says. “Now, a lot of different artists are starting to do country, and it has a lot of room to grow.”

Oregoner is available now on CD and major streaming services. Nick Gamer performs with Rutabaga Blossoms, a project featuring Eugene musician Corwin Bolt, and Eugene’s John Badger & The New Old Time Revival, 8 pm Sunday, Sept. 22 at John Henry’s, 881 Willamette Street; $10, 21-plus.