in Review

Margo Cilker – Valley of Heart’s Delight

Well, we’ve once again reached the point in the year that feels like a long slow march toward posting our Top Tens of the year in January. However, as far as December goes each year, I usually take this time to look back at a bunch of albums I haven’t really talked about in reviews or Little Picks on our podcast. Because I’ve been taking a more leisurely approach to reviewing albums, usually in one long monthly or seasonal post, it’s been pretty easy to keep up with talking about the albums that have impressed me this year. However, there have been a few from the last few months that I’ve been enjoying that I haven’t written about yet, and who knows, maybe there’ll be some albums from earlier in the year that I end up checking out and enjoying as various publications’ end-of-the-year lists start to trickle in.

My first entry is one of the more pleasant discoveries of 2023 for me, since I hadn’t listened to Margo Cilker’s debut album when her sophomore release dropped this September, but I quickly put the album in heavy rotation. I’m always fairly open to country and Americana music, but it does take a special kind of singer-songwriter to hook me into this most traditional of genres. Despite still having a fairly low profile, I’d like to think that Cilker is one of these artists, as there’s just something very warm and comforting about the songs on Valley of Heart’s Delight, even if there is a distinct restlessness in the lyrics.

Also, when it comes to country music, I’m often more drawn to outsiders than Nashville establishment-types, and Cilker certainly feels like one of those, releasing both of her albums on the Portland indie label Fluff & Gravy. Her Northwest ties also run deeper than that, as she’s currently based in rural Washington after spending several years living in Oregon. However, you get the sense in both her biography and her songs that she’s one of those troubadours without a real home, bouncing from region to region, letting the wind take her wherever the road may bend. Songs like “I Remember Carolina” or “Santa Rosa” recall the places Cilker has lived or traveled through, while the album’s indelible opener “Lowland Trail” firmly establishes her as a seeker looking for something out there in some mythic American landscape that probably doesn’t exist anymore (and maybe never did).

Margo Cilker’s direct, story-based songwriting is so good that it doesn’t even matter that the production and instrumentation is about as straightforward as it gets. The backing band she worked with features all sorts of veteran collaborators of PNW indie legends (The Decemberists, Neko Case, Band of Horses) and they give the songs just the right amount of weary muscle, while still keeping Cilker’s lyrics at the forefront. They’re so intoxicating that they give me a kind of nostalgic longing for the open expanses of the American West, even if they inhabit the kinds of small towns and unpopulated valleys that I was always just passing through.

Favorite Tracks: “Lowland Trail”, “With The Middle”, “All Tied Together”