|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In her sophomore release, the Los Altos-raised musician reflects on her roots.
To listen to Margo Cilker’s latest album, “Valley of Heart’s Delight,” is to travel down a trail with a seasoned rambler; to hear a fresh voice with an old soul; and to reckon with nostalgia both real and imagined. And the title, locals will likely recognize, is a reference to the nickname for pre-silicon Silicon Valley, when it was known for its apricot orchards, not its tech companies. It’s a setting that still tugs at the Santa Clara-born, Sunnyvale- and Los Altos-raised musician, no matter how far she roams.
“I remember California, San Francisco Bay” she sings on the album, lyrics to which surely many artists struggling to make it on the Peninsula can relate: “All my buddies live in Oakland. You know the arts don’t pay.”
Cilker, now based in the Pacific Northwest, is a rising star in the Americana and folk-country world thanks to her highly regarded debut album “Pohorylle,” released in 2021. Her follow-up, written during the pandemic’s peak and released this September, is earning a similarly warm reception. Songs like “Mother Told Her Mother Told Me” – about the ebb, flow and friction of family relationships – pack an emotional punch, while “Keep It on a Burner” offers a world-weary, clear-eyed optimism.
The album, like its predecessor, was produced by Sera Cahoone, with the help of many of the same backing musicians, including Cilker’s sister Sarah on harmony vocals and The Decemberists’ Jenny Conlee-Drizos on keys. Instruments like horns, pedal steel and banjo enhance, but Cilker’s voice is at the heart.
“I like really elemental stuff; a simple patchwork. It’s just kind of whatever suits the songs,” she said of her sound, which she likened to a “shapeshifter” for its mix of traditional twang and “Northwest indie” vibe.
She wasn’t always a country fan in her younger days.
“I didn’t see a honky tonk band until I left the Bay Area, I think. I didn’t really know about it. I knew what pop country music was – and I hated it,” she said. Instead, the burgeoning songwriter loved 1960s folk and rock icons, including Bob Dylan.
“You start with early Bob and it just gets progressively obscure. He got older and wonderfully weirder,” she said. But in Dylan’s early material, “he was emulating country blues. A door opened there for me.”
Using the patterns of country music as a framework, “gives my songwriting some parameters that are satisfying for me to meet,” she said. “I like having some structure. It feels good to have some order.”
Naming her album “Valley of Heart’s Delight” speaks to Cilker’s genuine and ongoing curiosity about her former homeland’s history, as well as agricultural issues in general.
“I’m really interested in agriculture, and I think it just kind of started out with a fascination, like any young humanities student who learns about farming would have,” she said. “‘Wow, there’s a big wide world out there! There’s more to life than Safeway!’ That was kind of a thread I kept pulling. It was really cool for me to work on farms and see how real food comes to the table.”
Those connections to the land, she said, are often obscured in suburban and urban centers. Growing up in affluent Silicon Valley, she was aware of “a lot of material wealth,” but also “kind of a more insidious suffering. I’m not a social scientist. All I know is what I feel. There’s a dis-ease among the people, whenever there is a severance from the land,” she said. “That’s what’s so precious about places like the Packard orchard in Los Altos Hills,” and the heritage apricot orchards in Sunnyvale and Los Altos.
“It’s important to keep those flourishing and have a remembrance,” she said.
Her father attended Los Altos High School with Robin Chapman, author of several books about local agricultural history, and Chapman’s work has helped fuel Cilker’s interest in and appreciation for the area’s pastoral past. She was surprised to discover “this depth of nostalgia I didn’t think was right in my literal backyard. … I had to see it through the lens of other places, and I came back and was like, ‘Whoa, this is very visceral for people that remember it.’”
Of course, her choice of album title is also somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
“It’s easy to look back 50, 60, 100 years ago and say, ‘Oh, it was such simple times!’” she said, but to do so risks romanticizing the inequalities and hardships that existed for many.
“Part of the nostalgia is a farce. There’s no ‘valley of heart’s delight’ – there wasn’t then, and there sure as sh-t isn’t now,” she said. “Real life is messy, it’s ugly, and just not black-and-white; there’s a gray area. There’s no grand marketing slogan that can blur away all the imperfections.”
Still, “I can look back, and when people reminisce, I believe them – that there was beauty in the life that they lived.”
Growing up, Cilker’s family sang hymns and folk songs together around the campfire. She got involved with music at church and in school, and started playing at local coffeehouse open-mic nights, including at the venerable Red Rock Coffee in downtown Mountain View, where as a teen, she and her friends would also busk on Castro Street.
Her father’s side of the family has deep roots in the South Bay, with the first Cilker emigrating from Germany in the late 1800s. Her grandparents started Pine Cone Lumber in Sunnyvale, which continues to be family-owned, and where Cilker has worked in the past. She’s also performed there, booked by her dad to play at the business’ annual special event: “April Tools Day.”
“I convinced him to hire me one year. I cashed in my nepo baby card,” she said, laughing.
As a student at Pinewood School, Cilker was a keen athlete, archives from this news organization show (she would have preferred to be gigging, “but sports are good too,” she said). And while grateful for her supportive family, she was eager to move on from her suburban Los Altos life.
“I was kind of curious to go experience another part of the country. I needed to spread my wings … to step outside my family world in the proverbial prodigal-daughter sense and pray they let me come crawling back when I ran out of money,” she recalled. “I needed a big departure.”
She went to college in South Carolina, fell in love with Spain, and worked on a dairy farm in Petaluma, among other forays. She lived in Oregon for a while, has toured all over the U.S., and is currently settled in rural eastern Washington with her husband, the songwriter and actual cowboy Forrest VanTuyl (along with their horses and dog).
“I’ve had to go very far and wide to have any semblance of booking shows, of having an audience at all,” she said.
Last year, she played at Menlo Park’s Guild Theatre for the first time. Her mom brought takeout from the Los Altos favorite Chef Chu’s to the green room, which Cilker said was the swankiest she’d ever seen.
Her journeys, both physical and metaphorical, find their way into her music.
“A lot of my life experiences obviously inspire the songs but I take some liberty here and there,” she said. “I sought out the experiences that would become the narratives I wanted to tell, in a sort of backwards way.”
For more information about Margo Cilker’s music, visit margocilkermusic.com.