Touted as ‘the future Lucinda Williams of the West’ (Bandcamp Daily), but with more old-school country colours to her, Margo Cilker’s third album, Little White Cross, which is also the first on her own label, comes, she says, from a place of darkness that sees life as “nasty, brutish, and short”, full of gun violence, wildfires and abuse, but also seeking glimmers of light to make it through to the next day. It finds her working with Bruce Robison behind the desk and musicians including Geoff Queen on guitars, Band of Heathens bassist Scott Davis, Lisa Pankratz on drums, pianist Emily Gimble, fiddler Beth Chrisman, Eric Heywood on pedal steel, and her sister Sarah on backing vocals. It’s a mix of original material and well-chosen covers, and it kicks off with the Christy Hays-penned title track: a briskly shuffling, brushed-snare number in classic country style, with the title referring to the plastic crosses that mark the site of fatal accidents but extending its meaning to all of life’s car crashes. Written by Sera Cahoone and with fiddle and Heywood on steel, Ladybug is a steady strummed number coloured with Band brushes that spins a tragic tale of leaving and loss, “all the signs were right there, we just couldn’t see…You were so young, so beautiful, you’ll always be”.
With upright bass and pedal steel, the first original, Molly And Me, is also an album highlight, a heartbreaking story song written about the teenage sister whose volatile brother carried out a mass shooting (“it’s true that we sincerely miss him/It’s just a shame they had to die when he did”) and sung from the perspective of her best friend, as it conjures dead end small town prospects.
With Forrest VanTuyl on organ, the steady walking guitar ringing State Line with its Southern bar groove is another of hers, a song about impulsive reckless love (“A manoeuvre of the heart that I regret”) in the Bible belt and breaking free of those chains (“You weren’t gonna stop til the state line/But some people wanna tell you what your heart’s like”).
Opening with a Spectorised salvo of drums, the album’s furnace is a full -blooded version of Tom Petty’s Walls that she makes unequivocally her own, taking things down a notch as the acoustic backwoods-toned slow-waltzing Pauline returns to her own work with another character for whom the cards never fell right (“you never had it easy…the last time I saw you..You were high as a kite ‘neath the grocery store lights”) whose life is cut short (“Just 42, I know you didn’t mean to do it, Pauline/The Spirit in the Sky came to take you on a ride”).
Two further covers follow: a piano and pedal steel (here by Queen) waltzing trip down Ian Tyson’s nostalgically poignant Road To Las Cruces, then, again with those Band hints and Robison on vocals. Kevin Carducci’s The Money, a song evoking a SoCal chill-out where “there’s a certain kind of freedom comes from living off the land/And a simple satisfaction getting by without a plan”.
The last original, a co-write with VanTuyl, is the playful and punning Maryhill Peaches, Goodnoe Pairs, a slow-swaying, droning love letter to two geographic landmarks along the Columbia River Gorge, the fruit-producing Maryhill and the nearby Goodnoe Hills, their produce, the spawning salmon, the ranching and the dancing serving as images of human relationships, beautifully captured in the lines “The rain falls on your land like it falls down on mine…If you need a neighbor you know I’ll be there”.
With pedal steel, piano, percussive claps and strummed acoustic, it ends with the final cover, as she sings her way through Stephanie Davis’s Wolves with its talk of farmers’ financial struggles when the bitter winter bites, of foreclosures and a questioning of God (“I don’t mean to be complaining, Lord you’ve always pulled me through/But tonight outside my window there’s that lonesome, mournful sound/And I can’t keep from thinking/About the ones the wolves pulled down”) and the quiet prayer “Lord keep me from being the one the wolves pull down”.
Forget any future Lucinda talk; this is the here-and-now Margo Cilker, and she’s magnificent.
Little White Cross (October 9th, 2026) Fossil Records