Margo Cilker’s 2021 debut Pohorylle was a refreshing take on Americana at a time when everyone with an acoustic guitar was relocating to Nashville, throwing on a flat brimmed cowboy hat, and elbowing their way onto an AmericanaFest stage. With Valley of Heart’s Delight, Cilker’s follow-up, she not only makes good on the promises hinted at in her debut but has turned in one of the most compelling albums of the genre so far this year.
The record starts off with “Lowland Trail,” a solid folk/country hybrid, but it’s on the next two tracks where she really shines; the horn-laden, unrushed “Keep It on A Burner” and “I Remember Carolina,” an undeniable earworm up there was with John Prine when it comes to charmingly sly wordplay. Across 11 tracks, the album is a near flawless exercise in songwriting. The album’s title is a reference to the Santa Clara Valley in California, home to companies like Apple, Google and Intel and for a couple of decades, Cilker, before she moved to the Pacific Northwest.
“I wrote these songs surrounded by the wild landscapes of the Northwest, but I was leaning toward the place I’d come from,” Clinker says. “I felt cut off from my family and the valley that held them. I spent hours thinking about my sense of belonging… I wrote about family — about death and rebirth, and the arcs of love and art through a family line.” You can hear these themes in songs like “Mother Told Her Mother Told Me”, and “Santa Rosa.” It also serves as a travelogue of sorts with songs about the orchards that used to line Santa Rosa County (long since gone) and the river that runs through the small Oregon town she lived in while writing the album. There is even a fun cover of Ben Walden’s “Steelhead Trout.”
The album closes on “All Tied Together,” the most earnest song on the record, a bittersweet track that perfectly contrasts with the more raucous and playful moments like “I Remember Carolina” and serves to highlight the depth of her songwriting prowess.
