New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Margo Cilker has announced an extensive
Spring 2024 U.S. tour following the release of her highly acclaimed new album Valley of Heart's Delight. Out now via Fluff & Gravy Records (Loose
Music in the UK/EU), the 11-track set has received Best of the Year nods from NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily, Stereogum, Paste Magazine, UNCUT, MOJO, Folk Alley, and more, as well as a 2024 UK Americana
Music Award nomination for International Album of the Year. Tickets for all shows go on sale this Friday, December 15, with Artist Presale beginning tomorrow, December 13, at 10am local time. Please see below for full tour details.
Margo Cilker On Tour:
March 7 — Boise, ID — Shrine Social Club (Tickets)
March 8 — Salt Lake City, UT — The
State Room (Tickets)
March 9 — Fort Collins, CO — Magic Rat (Free Show)
March 10 — Denver, CO —
Globe Hall (Tickets)
March 12 — Omaha, NE — Reverb (Tickets)
March 13 — Kansas City, KS — Knuckleheads (Tickets)
March 15 — Indianapolis, IN — LO-FI Lounge (Tickets)
March 16 — Lexington, KY — The Burl (Tickets)
March 17 — Newport, KY — Southgate House Revival (Tickets)
March 19 — Knoxville, TN — Barley's Taproom (Tickets)
March 20 — Winston-Salem, NC — The Ramkat (Tickets)
March 22 — Charleston, SC — The Pour House (Tickets)
March 23 — Atlanta, GA — The Earl (Tickets)
March 24 — Birmingham, AL — Avondale Brewing Company (Tickets)
March 26 — Jackson, MS — Duling Hall (Tickets)
March 27 — New Orleans, LA — Chickie Wah Wah (Tickets)
March 29 — Austin, TX — 3TEN ACL Live (Tickets)
March 30 — Fort Worth, TX — Tulips (Tickets)
April 2 —
Santa Fe, NM — Tumbleroot Brewery & Distillery (Tickets)
April 3 — Phoenix, AZ — The Dirty Drummer (Tickets)
April 5 — Los Angeles, CA — Zebulon (Tickets)
April 6 — San Francisco, CA — Bottom Of The Hill (Tickets)
Like Cilker's critically acclaimed debut, Valley of Heart's Delight was produced by Sub Pop alum Sera Cahoone (who also contributes drums) and recorded by John
Morgan Askew (Neko Case,
Laura Gibson) with studio players from The Decemberists, Band Of Horses, and Beirut.
The title refers to a place she can't return: California's
Santa Clara Valley, as it was known before the orchards were paved over and became more famous for Silicon than apricots. Margo is the fifth generation of Cilkers born there, and in this collection of songs, family and nature intertwine as guiding motifs, at once precious and endangered, beautiful and exhausting.
Cilker moved from California to the Pacific Northwest in her mid-twenties and wrote much of Valley of Heart's Delight while living in Enterprise, Oregon, a small town near the Snake River and powered by the river's massive, publicly-funded hydroelectric dams. The dams (part of the same system Woody Guthrie was hired to write about) provide clean electricity to much of the western US but make it extraordinarily difficult for anadromous fish (such as Steelhead Trout) to return from the ocean and spawn in their native streams.
Valley of Heart's Delight feeds off of this tension - how we live in and off of nature, how we live within and without family, and why we return to the places we were born.
"I wrote these songs surrounded by the wild landscapes of the Northwest, but I was leaning toward the place I'd come from," Cilker explains. "I felt cut off from my family and the valley that held them. I spent hours thinking about my sense of belonging. I'd traveled through many places and then, when the travel stopped, I ruminated on where I had ended up. Where were you when the music stopped? I was in Enterprise, OR. And there in Enterprise, my mind drifted back to the Valley of Heart's Delight.
I wrote about family - about death and rebirth, and the arcs of love and art through a family line. There are songs that hint at missteps and redemption. There are songs about trees: in orchard rows, family trees, redwoods. And water: agricultural runoff, wild rivers, dammed rivers, baptismal flows. And there's a song about a fish, cause it's a damn good song and I wanted to record it."
