Margo Cilker - Little White Cross (2026) [Hi-Res]

There are more than 1600 miles between Goldendale, Washington, and Lockhart, Texas. But that's how far Margo Cilker felt she had to go from her Pacific Northwest home to achieve what she was after for Little White Cross at producer Bruce Robison's studio just outside Austin.

By all available evidence, the end result justified the journey. You can feel the dry heat in the air on these recordings. And Robison—who also has a deep rep as an Americana singer/songwriter—turns out to be the ideal musical midwife for Cilker's unvarnished clarity of vision.

Everything comes straight across the plate. Cilker's delivery is even and unhurried. The band—including longtime Dave Alvin drummer Lisa Pankratz and Eric Heywood, best known for his pedal steel work with Son Volt—have enough chops to keep things enticing and enough soul to keep the foreground uncluttered. And it's all in the service of Cilker's storytelling.

The biggest difference between Little White Cross and its two predecessors is that more than half the tunes are covers. When Cilker isn't telling her own tales, she's putting her imprint on material from bygone heroes of American songwriting like Tom Petty and Ian Tyson as well as fellow travelers like Sera Cahoone and Kevin Carducci. But all of these songs are such a flattering fit that it almost feels like they could have been written for her.

In a way, the covers and the original tunes all arrive here the same way—as a response to a period of intense emotional turmoil in Cilker's life. Even the outside material was chosen as a means of both expression and catharsis for the emotionally scarred singer. So, while the hard-twanging country-rock stomp of the Cilker-penned "State Line" and the lonesome moan of her acoustic waltzing weeper "Pauline" feel like they're on a trajectory straight from her heart to your ears, so does a loud-and-proud take on Tom Petty's "Walls" (with a bravura contribution from Pankratz) and the haunting Christy Hays travelogue that gives the album its name.

As the aforementioned Petty tune goes, "Some things are over; some things go on." And by the time the dust clears, that's the primary emotional takeaway from Little White Cross. Cilker may have had to learn that the hard way, but for anybody absorbing the lesson second-hand from her, it sure goes down easy. © Jim Allen/Qobuz