Valley Of Heart’s Delight is Margo Cilker’s much-anticipated follow-up to her breakthrough debut album Pohorylle, written to a backdrop of the wild landscapes of her then home in Oregon (she now lives in rural Washington with songwriter and working cowboy husband Forrest Van Tuyl), but its soul was searching for California’s Santa Clara Valley, she the fifth generation of her family to be born there, but which no longer exists as it once stood. Originally known as Valley Of Heart’s Delight, it was once full of orchards before the booming electronics industries set up home there, after which it became known as Silicon Valley, the home of Apple, not apricots. As such, the album, again produced by Sera Cahoone with the same musicians, among them Jenny Conlee-Drizon from The Decemberists, additionally joined by Paul Brainard on pedal steel, fiddle player Annie Staninec and Caleb Kluder on harmonies, is a reflection on home, family, and the tension between nature and progress.
The journey home starts with the twangy Lowland Trail, a simple drover’s song (“Cattle pushing high up a canyon-side…Got miles before me, miles behind”) with a subtext about a failed love (“Got trouble cropping up where there could have been love…You put it all on the line and it wasn’t enough”).
New Orleans marching band brass and steady drum beat open the measured swaying country soul of Keep It On A Burner, a song of gratitude for when things feel like they’re dipping (“I got people, I got places, I got things, I got friends/I got something when there’s nothing coming up from within/I got postcards, I got music, I got someone’s hand to hold/I got whiskey, I got brandy, I got use for this old soul”) that throws in a reference to Creedence (“I got stuck in Lodi again”). Then, co-credited to VanTuyl, I Remember Carolina is a bouncy barroom piano rag with a Guthrie-like traintime chug that’s essentially a travelogue of places she’s been, among them Greenville, San Francisco Bay, Fickle Hill in Humboldt County, Montana and Idaho, recalling how she “Fell in love with a fisherman/But it was catch and release”, seeing Dylan (“He tipped his hat at me”) and hitching a ride to Boston with the Twelve Tribes Community, a spiritual nation that emerged from the Jesus Movement in the 70s.
She takes the tempo down on the spare acoustic, subtly organ-backed Beggar For Your Love and its warbled reflection on the nature of relationships (“You can get a good feel for where you belong only sometimes/You can get a good line to hold up a song if the rhyme’s right/I’ve been looking at the edges trying to find the in between /It shows on your face when my words mean nothing”). Probably the most musically adventurous with its use of piano, drums, guitar, steel and shifting tempos, Mother Told Her Mother Told Me rustles the branches of the family tree with its enigmatic line, “If you leave this town we will never have to wonder/If the roots are getting water underneath” and the refrain “Oh, the love/The way it cuts/Better than a knife/Bleeding for a lifetime”, ending in a freak folk acoustic coda. It hits the midway mark on With The Middle, a slow walking beat musing on the mundane everyday (“I get up at 8 AM/Press the coffee down again/I still leave half just in case/And I pour it out the next day”) that shifts from how “Sometimes a woman’s dream is to be alone” to a sense of purposeless (“What do I do with the middle/Between the coffee and the wine/The part of the day when my heart says/I won’t do it this time/You can ask my mom I’ve been doing great/At the beginning and the end of the day/But I hit a wall when the caffeine falls/And I’m staring at the cabinet”).
Another travelogue and co-write with her husband, featuring accordionist Conlee-Drizos and Idaho’s Ben Walden on harmonica, Santa Rosa finds the band having breakfast at a rest stop on the road (“I looked behind the counter/Saw three crosses above the pies/It all felt as familiar/As the place I’d left behind/ Someone bought a postcard/Someone bummed a smoke/Someone lit that cigarette/Then I bummed a toke”), that also doubles as a plug-in song for the town’s Comet II café.
Again adopting a swayalong rhythm with its gospel organ and piano, Crazy or Died is a rumination on a world gone to shit (“Everyone I look up to/Has gone crazy or died”) and snapshots of broken lives (“Maggio was a hug with two eyes/Served his country and his family/Fought fire from the skies/Through the bullets and the smoke/He made it alive/But the end of his tale/Brings a tear to my eye…Clementine was the light of my life/Was a dreamer, high achiever /But it never came out right/She left on a journey/Still out there today”), as she muses, “I don’t know who still lives by the words Jesus said/The bodies they’re stacking/They reach for the sky/If that guy comes back here/He’ll go crazy or die”.
There’s one cover, written by Idaho’s Ben Walden, Steelhead Trout is a lively Cajun two-step that again has a theme of resilience, as “only death can stop the Steelhead”, a reference to how the fish has overcome problems caused by dams that provide electricity but make it difficult to return from the ocean and spawn in local streams.
It ends with two further husband and wife co-writes, the John Prine-like waltzing Sound and Fury, sister Sarah on harmonies, about dealing with life’s chaos that namechecks two Idaho rivers, the Trinity in California, mentions Los Alton where the apricot orchards once flourished, the heritage of music (“a song down the ages”), and a bumper sticker reminder that “the state of your mind shouldn’t keep you from kindness”. Finally, the simply strummed, piano-stroked All Tied Together, inspired by the death of Justin Towne Earle, speaks of both the familial bonds that unite us and life’s injustices as she wonders, “Where does the fruit fall when you’ve tasted it all?/When the harvest lies green on the ground?/If it’s all tied together are we better unwound?”
With her 2021 debut, Pohorylle, Margo Cilker set herself a high benchmark, but with ‘Valley of Heart’s Delight’, she’s cleared that with ease and guaranteed another set of Album of the Year votes.