Review- Rattlesnakes and Wildfire Smoke: Margo Cilker’s Sophomore Album is a Bittersweet Folk Rollick Through the Valley of Margo’s Memories
Apricots don’t sell like silicone, and California’s once eden-like Santa Clara Valley now stands as a shiny but barren testament to that fact. Margo Cilker, whose debut album, Pohorylle, quickly rose like cream to the top of the favored list for critics after it’s quiet release in 2021, is a 5th generation native to the Santa Clara region, which unfortunately means she and her family have watched from the front row as the once fruitful valley, known informally as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, was sacrificed piece by piece on the altar of progress.
Cilker’s newly released sophomore album is a stirring and nostalgic tribute to the valley in its natural heyday and therefore goes by the same title, Valley of Heart’s Delight. Margo once again teamed up with Sarah Cahoone, her producer for Pohorylle, and using the understated musicianship and lyric focused production that garnered so many critical accolades during their first collaboration, the duo have created a second offering just as solid and free as the first. The Valley of Heart’s Delight culminates as something more than just bittersweet homage, and instinctively feels like a vivid and lyrically illustrative magic portal to a land long paved under in concrete; the Santa Clara Valley of old.
Photo By Jen Borst
All 11 tracks are held together by the guiding motifs of family and nature intertwined, wherein Margo doesn’t just revisit the valley of her memories, but also grapples with existential concepts of living simultaneously “in and off nature, and within and without family,” per the artist’s bio.
The album’s second track, "Keep it on a Burner" moves over you like a slow rolling river with big, broad melodic twists and turns of which Cilker says, "'Keep It on a Burner' is a stream-of-consciousness reflection. Fittingly, I started writing it while floating down the Salmon River on a whitewater rafting trip full of rattlesnakes and wildfire smoke. I think of it as a song about playing the long game and pursuing your heart’s delight, despite life's winding waterways."
Of the other ten tracks, you’ll have a hard time finding one without loads of lyrical savvy and perfectly placed, unobtrusive melodies that are anything but fluff and filler. Keeping in line with the stream-of-consciousness inherent in “Keep it on a Burner,” I offer the following brief but authentic observations of seven of the remaining ten tracks, though all deserve a listen:
I may be 7 years clean off horses, but the first track on the album, “Lowland Trail,” puts me in the mood to sway down a sleepy trail in the sunlight, pushing sleek baldies, and opting not to bother with the ones that wander too much.
“I Remember Carolina” is bouncing, rhythmic, and full of tongue-in-cheek humor that will elicit audible chuckles towards the end so long as you have any experience at all with Texas exceptionalism.
“Beggar For Your Love” comes in with a lilting and falling crescendo tag line that’ll see you swiftly immersed in a southern sing-a-long while you're doing dishes, I promise you.
“Mother Told Her Mother Told Me” with sister Sarah Cilker singing harmonies cuts “better than a knife bleeding for a lifetime,” and is a solemn and worelorn pause that necessarily reminds us the album’s full emotional catalog includes heavy helpings of regret, and of longing for a home that no longer exists anywhere but in the stories told to us by our fathers and grandfathers, and by our mothers and grandmothers.
“With the Middle” plain-faced states that “sometimes a woman’s dream is to be alone.” Margo asks what she should do with the middle of the day between the coffee and the wine, resulting in a relatable reflection on a woman's self-induced solitude where one can find a lonesome kind of peace.
“Santa Rosa” deftly paints a scene of a small town All-American coffee shop that somehow also feels like that small town Garden of Eden echo chamber you were born into, and then forced to willingly abandon in exchange for proverbial enlightenment. An easy choice at the time it is made, but one that will not eventually leave the wiser soul also wistful for a home no longer within reach, and with unshakeable feelings of being eternally unmoored in the world, albeit by your own hand.
If Margo’s cover of Ben Walden’s “SteelHead Trout'' doesn't get you to tappin’ your toes and wishing for an old timey, square dancin’, barn burner of a shindig, then nothing will. Margo chose to cover it partly due to its tie-in with the album’s concept, and partly because, in her words, “It's a damn good song, and I wanted to record it.” Concur.
The album is a lovely, folksy, ballsy little number from top to bottom, and one that leaves me hopeful the collaboration between Coohen and Cilker continues for many albums to come. Of the album, Margo herself says “I wrote these songs surrounded by the wild landscapes of the Northwest, but I was leaning toward the place I’d come from. I felt cut off from my family and the valley that held them. I spent hours thinking about my sense of belonging. I’d traveled through many places and then, when the travel stopped, I ruminated on where I had ended up. Where were you when the music stopped? I was in Enterprise, OR. And there in Enterprise, my mind drifted back to the Valley of Heart’s Delight.”
Margo lives with her singer/songwriter husband, Forrest VanTuyl, along the Columbia River “with their dog and some horses,” according to her bio, which incidentally Their Dog and Some Horses might make a splendid title for the third album we can hope isn’t too many years away. Margo Cilker’s Valley of Heart’s Delight is available on most streaming platforms or by following the artist’s links below:
