Margo Cilker is not afraid of lyrical repetition. In the coda to the goodtime song “I Remember Carolina” (written with her husband, singer songwriter Forrest VanTuyl) on her second album Valley of Heart’s Delight, she repeats “best burger in Texas” about a dozen times in a row, evoking the bragging claims of roadside billboards on a long road trip. That song is a rollicking take on all the good times she remembers in some of the places where Cilker has lived and/or performed, and particularly pokes affectionate fun at the Lone Star State.
On her third full length Little White Cross, an altogether more somber affair, she similarly employs repetition in the coda to “Molly and Me,” one of four songs she wrote for the album. But in a far different context, and to a much different effect. After laying out the sadly all to familiar tale of a young man who goes on a rampage with a gun, told from the point of view of a teenage friend of his sister’s, she asks again and again, “Is this all we’re made of?”
That question is pretty much a theme running through the 10 songs on Little White Cross. It’s a country folk album of a very high order, worthy of mention in the same breath as some of her inspirations like Guy Clark, Willie, Waylon, and the Flatlanders. The spirit and lives of working people in the West drift through these songs like dust and tumbleweeds.
Cilker must have been asked many times if this was a concept record, because she says in a press release, “You could definitely call it a concept record, if that concept is that I got really sad and went to Texas.” What she did in Texas was set up with legendary producer (and singer-songwriter) Bruce Robison at h is studio in Lockhart and recorded a batch of deeply sad songs. She took with her pedal steel master Eric Heywood (Son Volt, The Jayhawks, John Doe, Joe Henry, Tift Merritt, Over the Rhine, The Pretenders, etc., etc.), and Robison called in some similar alt country legends like drummer Lisa Pankratz, guitarist Geoff Queen and fiddler Beth Chrisman.
Cilker showed repeatedly on the critically acclaimed Valley of Heart’s Delight and her debut Pohorylle how good she is at evoking a sense of place in her songs, especially those places she has lived in and loved, like her native Santa Clara Valley in California and her current home in the Palouse country of eastern Washington State. The title song, which was written by her friend Christy Hays, could be anywhere in the West, though, where crosses mark the site of crashes along the long desolate highways. “Little white cross on the side of the road / Little fake flower and a crown of gold / They were going so fast how were they to know / They’d be a little white cross on the side of the road.”
The songs by others she chose to cover also strongly evoke Western themes and places. The best among them is Ian Tyson’s “The Road to Las Cruces,” but right up there with it is her own “Maryhill Peaches, Goodnoe Pears,” set solidly in her own neighborhood along the Columbia River. “The Money,” by California honky-tonker Kevin Carducci, casts a mildly critical eye on the lives of the men who work to extract wealth from the earth by logging, mining, etc. “We’re comin’ home, countin’ the money / countin’ the money, that we made…” Cilker’s “Pauline” is a quietly devastating portrait of the short hard life of a diner waitress. And the closer, “The Wolves” by Austin singer songwriter Stephanie Davis, uses the short hard lives of herd animals killed by predators in a hard winter as metaphor for the kind of folks who people many of these songs, who fall by the wayside through some combination of bad luck, bad choices and the cold hard ways of capitalism.
I’m sure these songs hit home just as hard in a solo acoustic setting, but the choices made by the contributing musicians — especially Heywood and Pankratz — really make these songs soar on record.
If you don’t know Margo Cilker’s music yet, it’s time to check her out. And if you’re already a fan who at first finds Little White Cross less immediately compelling than Valley of Heart’s Delight, stick with it. It’s a slow burner.
(Fossil Records, 2026)
