Acclaimed Western folk singer-songwriter Margo Cilker has announced her highly anticipated third album, Little White Cross, due out October 9 via Fossil Records, a label Cilker recently launched with fellow musician ISMAY. The upcoming 10-song set follows 2023’s Valley of Heart’s Delight, which was nominated for International Album of the Year at the 2024 UK Americana Music Awards and received Best of the Year nods from NPR Music, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, Bandcamp Daily, Paste, No Depression, Uncut, Mojo, BrooklynVegan, and more. Upon release, Cilker will embark on an East Coast co-headline tour with Lilly Hiatt, followed by headlining shows in Portland and Seattle and a West Coast run supporting The Cactus Blossoms. See below for full tour details.
Today, Cilker is sharing the album’s title track and lead single “Little White Cross,” available now on all platforms. Originally written and recorded by her friend Christy Hays, it feels country-classic in Cilker’s hands as she allows the stark imagery of a car crash to carry the grander context of repercussions—what we’ll answer for as individuals, as a society, as a species. It’s a song that Cilker 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.
For Little White Cross, Cilker traveled to Lockhart, Texas, to record at The Bunker 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 says. “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.'”
When Cilker revealed to Robison the saddest of her songs, the pair made a conscious choice to let despair lead, recording directly to tape in an all-analog setup with a studio band comprising her “pedal steel secret weapon” Eric Heywood, Geoff Queen (Hayes Carll), Beth Chrisman (John C. Reilly), Lisa Pankratz (Dave Alvin), and Scott Davis (Band of Heathens), among others. They situated Cilker’s originals among a selection of covers that she had taken to playing as a way to process her own pain, some sourced from within her immediate music community. The choice embraces the longtime tradition of Texas troubadours trading tunes and the art of transforming one work into something distinct, while honoring its soul.
“When I find a song that really speaks to me, it helps me make sense of things,” she says. “Writing can be a lonely affair. But that exchange, that open spirit, it feels essential to art for me.”
The process of writing her own songs, on the other hand, can be intense, almost supernatural. “I often feel haunted by stories, kept up at night by a kind of external pressure to tell them,” says Cilker. “I’ll write a song just to alleviate the grip it has on me.”
Album standout and upcoming single “Molly and Me” emerged from that unconscious urgency. Written about the teenage sister of an armed suspect in a mass shooting, from the perspective of her best friend, it’s an artful and affecting display of human complexity: And her mom did what she could to listen / And it’s true that we sincerely miss him / It’s just a shame they had to die when he did / None of this will ever be undone. Cilker withholds no nuance in conveying the unthinkable, allowing human suffering its due specificity. “Just because something horrible happens time and time again, that doesn’t make it any less horrible.”
For Cilker, songwriting is a contribution to humanity, a way of making the world a better place. “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 will arrive on October 9, 2026 via Fossil Records.
