THE scene inside Margo Cilker’s home – a cosy ranch-style property located on a horse farm in Goldendale, Washington, a rural community about 90 minutes east of Portland – is the picture of domestic bliss. The 30-year-old singer-songwriter has gotten a late start and, with her husband Forrest Van Tuyl and her sister Sarah, is preparing a midday meal of avocado toast with tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs. The house is perfectly unkempt, filled with second-hand furniture, music equipment and old issues of The New Yorker, and a very skittish dog who spends the late morning pacing around the property.
Most importantly, it looks and feels lived in. For the past two years, Cilker and Van Tuyl have stayed put in the same location, leaving only to tour or to make their regular pilgrimage to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. For the first time in a long time, Cilker feels somewhat settled. “I think I just kind of shifted my priorities,” she says, between bites of breakfast at her slightly rickety dining room table. “I mean, we have a PO Box! I love just having an address at all. Having a credit card, having stability. Part of that is I definitely had to slow down to have a life partner. We need to focus on each other. It’s not just, ‘What do I feel like doing?’ any more.”
That Cilker has been able to in 2021. In the interim, she has spent ample time on the road, scoring plum gigs supporting Drive-By Truckers and Hayes Carll. was nominated for International Album of the Year at the 2023 UK Americana Awards (she lost to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss). And somewhere in the thick of this activity, Cilker found time to record her second album, .