Margo Cilker returns today with her already highly acclaimed third album, Little White Cross, via her own Fossil Records, a label she recently launched with fellow musician ISMAY. On their latest New Music Friday episode, NPR Music counts it among the best albums out this week, with critic Stephen Thompson praising it as “plainspoken, vividly detailed, thoughtful, and just all around beautiful.” Uncut calls it “her most powerful record yet” in an extensive five-page spread from their October print issue. Bandcamp Daily adds in today’s Album of the Day review, “Cilker’s undeniable vocals are as compelling as they’ve ever been. There’s a subtle but essential weariness in her cadence that makes the quietest moments on the record conjure emotional avalanches.”
In celebration of today’s release, Cilker is currently on an East Coast co-headline tour with Lilly Hiatt, which she will follow with headlining shows in Portland and Seattle and a West Coast run supporting The Cactus Blossoms. See below for full tour details.
Cilker recorded the 10-track set in Lockhart, Texas, with Bruce Robison, the writer/producer behind work by Charley Crockett, Lee Ann Womack, George Strait, and The Chicks. “You could definitely call it a concept record. If that concept is that I got really sad and went to Texas,” she offers. “I had some material so dark I didn’t think I’d show it to [Bruce]. Then I remembered this is the man who wrote ‘Travelin’ Soldier.'” One of the songs she’s referring to is “Molly and Me,” which Bandcamp Daily calls her “masterpiece,” adding, “It’s a gut-wrenching text, one that, in its evocative vignettes of blue-collar America and spare instrumentation, could be considered alongside the likes of Nebraska or Time (The Revelator).” Qobuz says Cilker’s originals “feel like they’re on a trajectory straight from her heart to your ears” in their roundup of the week’s best albums, and Rolling Stone hails the songs as “tales that cement Margo Cilker as an incisive young storyteller” in their latest print issue.
On Little White Cross, originals like “Molly and Me” are situated among a selection of covers that Cilker had taken to playing as a way to process her own pain. She embraces the longtime tradition of Texas troubadours trading tunes and the art of transforming one work into something distinct, sourcing songs like the album’s title track from within her immediate music community. In an in-depth feature, No Depression’s Neil Ferguson notes, “Covering songs by her friends and inspirations became a guiding force for the album, with six of the 10 tracks written by others. Listen to Cilker’s renditions and it becomes clear why she included them alongside originals that are among her most vivid and stirring lyrics to date.” Of the covers, Glide Magazine says, “They sit so naturally alongside Cilker’s originals that the distinction hardly matters. She makes each one feel unmistakably her own,” and former BrooklynVegan editor Andrew Sacher adds in his new Unhappy Place Substack, “Margo’s as great a curator as she is a songwriter, and her distinct, subdued, indie-friendly style makes all of these songs sound cut from the same exact cloth.”
Originally written and recorded by her friend Christy Hays, “Little White Cross” feels country-classic in Cilker’s hands. It’s a song she gravitated toward for its masterful blend of realism and poetry: Little white cross on the side of the road / Little fake flower and a crown of gold / They were going so fast how were they to know / They’d be a little white cross on the side of the road. “When I find a song that really speaks to me, it helps me make sense of things,” Cilker says. “Writing can be a lonely affair. But that exchange, that open spirit, it feels essential to art for me.”
For Cilker, songwriting is a contribution to humanity. “You don’t know what people have lived through, what another person is carrying with them,” she says. “Every time I’ve written something about hardship, or gone to a place people don’t want to go, there has been someone who tells me they needed it.”
Little White Cross is out now via Fossil Records. It follows Cilker’s sophomore record, ‘Valley of Heart’s Delight,’ which was named one of the 50 Best Albums of 2023 by NPR Music, one of the 75 Best Albums of 2023 by Uncut and Mojo, and one of the Best Country Albums of 2023 by Rolling Stone, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, Paste, and more.
