Margo Cilker describes her music as “folkabilly”—the same term singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith preferred—or, if pressed, “folk with country stylings.” If these labels evoke rootsy fantasy or ironic cowboy vaudeville, Cilker, a breakout voice in Americana music who just released her second album, delivers something else entirely: the contemporary American West unvarnished, well-worn, rough, beautiful.
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Cilker’s lyrics skew autobiographical: she works on a dairy farm in Petaluma, California; gets bitten by a bad dog somewhere in Idaho; and eats Christmas chili in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. When I first heard her 2021 debut album, Pohorylle, I was drawn to her self-portraiture in the West, a project she carries forward on her newly released follow-up, Valley of Heart’s Delight. Especially distinctive is Cilker’s depiction of the rural Pacific Northwest, where she’s made her home for the past six years. Fittingly, when I saw Cilker play this past July, it was on a farm in the shadow of Mount Adams, at the Cave Creek Ramble music festival in Trout Lake, Washington.
Of the 300 people in attendance at “the Ramble,” as everyone there called it, half wore bandannas around their necks. Kids in face paint and fairy costumes napped in camp chairs. The farm’s website had urged me to bring myself “and an open mind.” I’d brought my six-year-old, Wes.
Wes and I introduced ourselves to Cilker, the festival’s headliner, and he chattered at her about his summer camp on the Washougal River in Washington. “Skamania County,” Cilker said knowingly. When Wes asked her a series of increasingly embarrassing questions culminating in a marriage proposal, she declined graciously, showing him her wedding band.
Onstage, Cilker was so charismatic yet humble that I’d wondered whether she often finds herself on the receiving end of spontaneous marriage proposals. Her illustrious band (she records with members of the Decemberists and Beirut) doesn’t tour with her, so tonight she was supported by talent from close to home, including her husband, Forrest VanTuyl, on bass. Her band sounded incredible. Some credit must go to sound engineer Bart Budwig, an alt-country musician himself who’d played the Ramble the night before. He joined Cilker to play cornet on her unreleased song “Here in Baker,” in which Cilker croons: “Go find yourself a bunkhouse / where you can raise your brand of hell / and yell the way that the coyotes around you yell.” (The crowd howled in response.) Both Budwig and Cilker belong to a cohort of artists who have made names for themselves at the historic OK Theatre in Enterprise, Oregon.
Early in her set, Cilker shouted, “Some friends from Wallowa County came out to see us in Klickitat County tonight.” Describing location by county is a habit I remember from my childhood in Oregon and one that’s present in Cilker’s lyrics. While the title of “Tehachapi” refers to the city in Kern County, California, one verse contrasts Kern with Sonoma County, where “the grass is feisty / it’ll put a tear in your eye / make your nose run like it was wanted.” County is more than a fun word to sing with a twang. In the West, we talk about counties to claim for ourselves what lies beyond city limits. To name a county is to invoke a landscape: a mountain range, a valley, a canyon, a river. The particular topography that makes a place a place.
“Setting is the tool in my songwriting to help me get to the point,” Cilker tells me. “We’re always going to start with setting.” The songs on Pohorylle follow her to South Carolina and to the Basque region of Spain before she heads home. Out West, her lyrical coordinates get increasingly remote. Cilker’s song “That River” refers to the Wallowa River, which flows through Enterprise and the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest in eastern Oregon—an enchanting corner of the state rarely talked (or sung) about in Portland, never mind in San Francisco or New York.
A week after the Cave Creek Ramble, I drove out to Cilker’s current home in Goldendale, Washington. Cilker and VanTuyl, a working cowboy and artist who writes and performs as an American Forrest, rent a small farmhouse at the end of a dirt road. When I arrived, Cilker greeted me barefoot and introduced me to two horses and a placid Pyrenees named Goose before taking me inside. She set a bowl of cherries on the table between us, plus a jam jar for the pits.
The horses belong to VanTuyl. He and Cilker met while playing a string of shows together in Northern California. They were engaged within a week. She moved with him to Enterprise and promptly fell off a horse, sustaining the injury that inspired “Broken Arm in Oregon” off Pohorylle. On her decision to move from California to the Northwest, Cilker tells me, “As an artist, you find cheap rent in a place with writers. That’s going to be mercurial. It’s not going to exist in the same place forever. But for a minute there, all these writers were cohabitating in the OK Theatre.”
Cilker’s star is rising, even as she remains loyal to the OK Theatre scene. Valley of Heart’s Delight was recorded in Vancouver, Washington, and produced by Seattle legend Sera Cahoone, who seasons Cilker’s songs with grunge-adjacent moodiness. These are songs about the loneliness of the road, about hard work on the farm and in the studio, about the people we leave behind and the places to which we can’t help wandering back. A standout from the new record is “Santa Rosa,” Cilker’s meditation on marriage plagued by wanderlust while one partner’s “feet know where to stand.” Another gem is “Mother Told Her Mother Told Me,” written after a fraught visit to the family farm left the singer reflecting on love that “cuts better than a knife / bleedin’ for a lifetime.” “That sensation drives a lot of my art,” Cilker says. “That feeling of loving a thing that keeps hurting.”
I followed Cilker off the ranch and into Goldendale proper to have a beer at her local watering hole. Soon after we sat down, she looked past me and said, “Most Goldendale shit ever.” I turned to watch a man walk into the bar cradling a baby goat. We talked about my own stint on the road, and I mentioned that I’d been staying at my parents’ house in Camas, Washington.
“What county is that?” Cilker asked.
“Clark County,” I told her, although she probably already knew. Setting doesn’t just help Margo Cilker get to the point. It is the point.•
Emily Adrian is the author of four novels. Her work has appeared in Granta, Joyland, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She's an editor at Great Place Books.
