Life can be boozy fun one moment and a vise-like hangover the next, to be sure, but the reality is it’s more of a day-in, day-out grind. It’s corralling cattle both literal and metaphoric, of finding things to do with one’s free time. We wake, work and head to bed, every so often remembering (and sometimes mourning) the world we once knew—our families, friends and neighborhoods, to be specific. Memories forever simmer on the proverbial back burner in our mind.
Margo Cilker’s sophomore set, Valley of Heart’s Delight, explores the dichotomy between the world she once knew and the world she now knows. As a kid, she explained to the Missoulian newspaper last year, she grew up in the Bay Area, where she sang in both choir and church, and grooved to the folk and folk-rock sounds of the 1960s and ‘70s. (How that morphed into a country-tinged style, she isn’t sure.) But her slice of paradise, aka the Santa Clara Valley, has undergone major changes through the decades—as her family, which has lived and worked there since the late 1950s, can attest. Once known for its orchards and farms, it’s now the home to a suburban sprawl birthed from the tech boom. But she’s also bounced around a fair bit through the years, from attending summer camp in North Carolina, college in South Carolina (where she sang in area clubs more than anything), and working on a Montana farm, not to mention stints in various other states. Is home where one hangs one’s hat or a state of mind? Does it matter?
Truth is, as Bruce Springsteen sings in “Atlantic City,” “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact/But maybe everything that dies some day comes back.”
Anyway, as on her debut, Cilker often sounds like a young Lucinda Williams. The songs dig into finding one’s way, memories, ill-begotten love, leaving home and family, and how no one abides by the words Jesus said. She hones in on specifics throughout. “I get up at 8AM,” she sings in “With the Middle,” “Press the coffee down again/I still leave half just in case/And I pour it out the next day.” Later, she ponders what I mentioned above: “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.”
Cilker has a knack for strong lines to end a stanza or song, the kind that knock you back a few feet—similar, in some respects, to the poet James Wright. As she sings in “I Remember Carolina” at one point, “I remember being homesick/I don’t know where my home is/I remember being free.”
Valley of a Heart’s Delight is a great album. Seek it out.
The Old Grey Cat 
2 thoughts