Western folk singer-songwriter and AUK favourite Margo Cilker has announced her 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 AUK and a whole list of other publications.
Cilker has also released the album’s title track and lead single, Little White Cross, which is available now on all platforms. Originally written and recorded by her friend Christy Hays, it uses 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 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.
To record the album, Cilker travelled 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.'”
Apparently 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 honouring the core of the song.
“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.” And of her own songs, she says, “I often feel haunted by stories, kept up at night by a kind of external pressure to tell them, I’ll write a song just to alleviate the grip it has on me.”
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” Tracklisting:
1. Little White Cross
2. Ladybug
3. Molly and Me
4. State Line
5. Walls
6. Pauline
7. Road to Las Cruces
8. The Money
9. Maryhill Peaches, Goodnoe Pears
10. Wolves
