This story is featured in CityBeat’s March 6 print edition.
With Valley of the Heart’s Delight, her second record, Margo Cilker delivers a rich travelogue of roots music that puts her on the map, literally and figuratively. Cilker is part of her family’s fifth generation born in California’s Santa Clara Valley — the same one referenced in the bittersweet title. Since this rural farmland was transformed into Silicon Valley with pavement replacing pasture, Cilker relocated to the Northwest, first in Oregon, and now lives in rural Washington with her husband, a working cowboy. But fulfilling the promise of her 2021 debut, Pohorylle, Cilker’s new songs both treasure and lament the experiences of growing up in this bucolic land with her family. Sarah Cilker, Margo’s sister, sings harmony on the record, which developed organically from family singalongs.
Cilker’s warm, plaintive voice and evocative songwriting take center stage here with spare arrangements played by her country-folk band. A few Valley highlights are “Keep It On a Burner,” a lilting litany of Cilker’s simple pleasures in life backed by woozy horns, “I Remember Carolina,” a trad-country romp of travel adventures recounted with fiddle, mandolin and pedal steel, and “Beggar for Your Love,” an acoustic ache shadowed in regret.
In an interview last year with Palo Alto Online, Cilker explains the origin of her record title: “It’s easy to look back 50, 60, 100 years ago and say, ‘Oh, it was such simple times!’ Part of the nostalgia is a farce. There’s no ‘valley of heart’s delight’ — there wasn’t then, and there sure as shit isn’t now. Real life is messy, it’s ugly, and just not black-and-white; there’s a gray area. … Still, I can look back, and when people reminisce, I believe them — that there was beauty in the life that they lived.”
Margo Cilker plays the Southgate House Revival on March 17 at 7:30 p.m. Info: southgatehouse.com.
This article appears in Feb 21 – Mar 5, 2024.