Margo Cilker has always been a roamer. Her second album, Valley of Heart’s Delight (due out this Friday via Portland label Fluff & Gravy Records), glimmers with a variety of imagery—from the vast Santa Clara valley to Oregon’s woodland trails.
“I had to remove the idea that if I was going to sing about a place it had to already be mythologized,” Cilker says. “I can’t sing about the Mississippi River because it’s not where I am.”
Traveling seems to be Cilker’s “resting state.” When she logs on for this interview, she is relaxing on a breezy patio in Europe. Her camera pans across the tranquil, azure waters below, and I can practically smell the salty air through the screen.
“I’ll get to one side of the coast and turn around like a lemming,” Cilker says. “Touring works for me … it helps me cope.”
Cilker’s debut album, Pohorylle, pulled influences from 10 years of playing on the road, but she wrote Valley of Heart’s Delight during the pandemic’s isolation. “It was more frightening to see what I came up with out of the nothingness,” Cilker laughs, “[I’m] seriously putting a song about a burger on an album.”
Cilker was referring to “I Remember Carolina,” a lilting song that explores the various places she has played throughout the years. She sings about the “good family with a bad dog” in Idaho and the “bender in Bozeman,” but it’s her playful jab at Texans’ egos that’s the most memorable. You can hear the chuckle in her voice as she croons about the “best burger in Texas” and remembering the Alamo.
Though the experiences she sings about are wholly her own, Cilker worked closely with her sister Sarah while crafting the record. Sarah’s harmonies tie the musical flavors together like bay leaves in a soup.
“I’m so used to singing with my sister,” Cilker says, “I don’t like overdubbing harmonies because it sounds so robotic. It sounds unnatural to me.”
These warm sibling harmonies soar in “Sound and Fury,” a song that both celebrates and grapples with Cilker’s family history. When writing the song, Cilker said she felt like she was diving into “the whirlpool of [her] past.” This floating waltz shimmers with the help of Decemberists member Jenny Conlee-Drizos’ saloon-style piano solos and Caleb Klauder’s jangly mandolin arrangements, but it’s Margo’s autobiographical lyrics that grip your ears.
The last verse of the song describes Cilker’s family home in Los Altos, California, where she frequently visited as a kid. It’s an idyllic area with expansive vistas. A river trickles next to a stone chapel that her great grandfather built by hand. But even with these relics of the past, the area looks vastly different today. The valley, once full of fragrant apricot orchards, has been replaced by Silicon Valley’s suburban sprawl.
“When you’re younger, you have your family’s mythology … and that’s a bond you share,” Cilker says. But as she’s gotten older, Cilker has started to understand the privilege that comes along with it. “My family, we have been landowning white people for five generations in the Santa Clara Valley,” CIlker says, “And that’s something obviously to come to terms with, [the] generational wealth and holding on to your place in the world because of a colonial settler psyche.”
The album ends with the introspective ballad, “All Tied Together.” Though it was largely inspired by Justin Towne Earle’s untimely death, the song seems to grieve even more: the bulldozed orchards, the traffic-filled streets, and life’s injustices. At the end of Valley of Heart’s Delight, Cilker leaves you with the question, “If it’s all tied together, are we better unwound?”
