Photo: Jen Borst

If you’ve ever driven through northern California, chances are you’ve marveled at its luminous golden rolling hills. On the cover of her latest album, 2023’s Valley of Heart’s Delight, singer-songwriter Margo Cilker reclines on a rocky outcrop high above the Columbia River Gorge. Behind her, a different landscape’s similarly curvaceous, honeyed hills slope dramatically to meet the Columbia River where it slices between Oregon and Washington. Though some 800 miles Northwest of California, these Washington hills are inexorably linked to California’s through Cilker’s intimate musical snapshots of place and time and connection to both.

In name, Valley of Heart’s Delight, refers to the Santa Clara Valley before it became Silicon Valley, where Cilker was born, the fifth generation in her family to do so. Long before her birth, the valley’s verdant fruit trees felled for new development gave way to concrete and technology hubs. But in old timers’ stories, it was something close to paradise.

“The way they talk about it, they just get this look in their eyes – nostalgia – maybe these people do remember something different,” Cilker says. “And that helped me; I felt some relief knowing that it might not be a bucolic place now. When it was, it wasn’t like a perfect time: there was poverty, but a lot of families could have 40 acres of trees and live off of that.”

Once we’ve lived a moment, all that remains are memories. And for some, memories are the only way to explore a place we’ll never know. Cilker wanted to understand where she came from and to pay tribute to her roots. “It felt important to me. It just wasn’t going anywhere. I kind of tried to make sense of it. Like, ‘what am I doing in Washington and writing about this place?’” she says.

Cilker bridges the gap between where she grew up and where she wrote the album – Goldendale, Washington, where she now lives – by filling her Valley with both her own lived memories and those of her ancestors and acquaintances. With realism and a deft grasp on the tension inherent to human and worldly existence, Cilker sings a series of snapshots, the imagined and recollected both equally vivid in their retelling through her eyes.

Though Cilker sets out “lookin’ for lowland trail,” on the album’s first track, the path of least resistance is illusive. Quickly she layers in “Keep it on a Burner” and “I Remember Carolina” two matter-of-fact, almost stream of consciousness reflections on the way life’s little regrets pile up, and the highs and lows of the places she’s visited on the road, respectively. In the same straightforward way throughout the album, which blends Western, country, bluegrass, and folk stylings, Cilker explores the burdens and complexities of relationships: past ones, familial, romantic, and with vice.

As an itinerate traveler, the stories of the road shaped Cilker. Along the way she stops off for breakfast at a roadside diner in Santa Rosa, NM and celebrates her fellow traveler, the “Steelhead Trout,” (written by Ben Waldon). The journey ends with “All Tied Together,” wherein resisting the urge to wrap the album in a neat bow, Cilker muses about the perils of connection: “If it’s all tied together, are we better unwound?”

When she started writing music, Cilker drew inspiration from Gillian Welch and Joan Baez. But she puzzled over her intense connection to songs like “Red River Valley” and Baez’s rendition of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” until she realized she was drawn to the traditional American tunes’ fierce sense of place.

“The people in that song are very tied to place for better, for worse,” she says. “It was also freeing for me to realize, ‘okay well, these songs that I’m listening to in the country’s tradition are writing about the Mississippi River or this or that, but I don’t live there.’ So I need to free myself to write about the American West, or places I have seen.”

At once straightforward and lyrical, Cilker’s writing often evokes a moment or a feeling that, much like a Polaroid snap, is flawed, but immensely, urgently evocative. Indeed, she wrote one of her best-known songs, “Broken Arm” (off of her first album, Pohorylle), while recovering with her own broken arm from falling off a horse shortly after moving to rural Enterprise, Oregon to be with her fiancé (now husband). In the listless haze of convalescence, she contemplated the brutality in the world outside her widow and across the country in a senate chamber where Christine Blasey Ford testified in Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing.

“I was able to reflect on it…if you’re feeling manic and doing a million things, you can’t think or process. But I was just sitting there, I was laid up,” she says. “I think I felt pretty hopeless.”

Literal though she is about many moments in her songs, Cilker doesn’t intend all of her music to align perfectly with a single reality or story. “People get very attached to understanding. But that’s not what all art is made for,” she says. “I’m okay to leave things a little bit out for jury, room for convocation and discomfort, multiple emotions. I love when people are like, ‘well, who is Kevin Johnson? [the title character in a song from Pohorylle]’ And I’m like ‘let us just wash over you.’”

Sharing these places and memories with an audience is essential for Cilker. Relaxed and personable on stage, she derives the same feeling from her concerts that she did growing up singing in church – minus the religion. She relishes the feeling of togetherness, excitement, and the intoxicating thrill of the tension that builds before a show – you never know just what you’re going to get until the music starts.

“That energy is amounting towards something. It’s kind of metaphysical, but it’s true. I was in musical theater and performance; it felt like such an important aspect of life,” she says. “There’s no existence without this.”