Margo Cilker’s Little White Cross begins in despair and, remarkably, finds its way toward something resembling hope. Her third album, due October 9 on Fossil Records, was recorded in Lockhart, Texas, with producer Bruce Robison, and it finds Cilker confronting death, violence, grief, loneliness and the seemingly endless accumulation of bad news without attempting to soften any of it. Recorded directly to analog tape with a seasoned Texas band that includes pedal steel player Eric Heywood, guitarist Geoff Queen, fiddler Beth Chrisman, drummer Lisa Pankratz and bassist Scott Davis, the album has the lived-in sound of classic country while remaining firmly rooted in Cilker’s contemporary Western songwriting.
The title track, written by Cilker’s friend Christy Hays, establishes the album’s emotional landscape with the image of a roadside memorial becoming a meditation on mortality and the consequences of the choices we make. “Molly and Me” goes even deeper, telling a devastating story surrounding a mass shooting while refusing the easy answers that such a subject invites. Cilker’s own songs are particularly powerful when she focuses on ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. “State Line” and “Pauline” feel less like grand statements than intimate portraits, the kind of songs where small details carry the emotional weight. Cilker has said she often feels haunted by stories until she writes them down, and that compulsion is evident throughout Little White Cross.
The album’s six covers are equally important to its design. Rather than functioning as filler between Cilker’s originals, they become part of the conversation, reflecting the songs she turned to while working through a difficult period. Her version of Tom Petty’s “Walls” is particularly effective, while Kevin Carducci’s “The Money” fits naturally alongside her own material. “Maryhill Peaches, Goodnoe Pears,” co-written with Forrest VanTuyl, is perhaps the album’s most distinctive piece, using the agricultural landscape of the Columbia River Gorge and the double meaning of “peaches” and “pairs” to explore relationships and separation.
What could have become an unrelentingly bleak album instead develops an unexpected warmth. Robison’s production gives the songs a traditional country frame without polishing away their rough edges, while the pedal steel, fiddle, guitar and rhythm section know when to step forward and when to disappear. “Ladybug” and “Molly and Me” are especially affecting examples of Cilker allowing devastating stories to coexist with the ordinary details of everyday life. Even at its darkest, Little White Cross remains remarkably approachable because Cilker understands that despair does not exist separately from the rest of life; grief, beauty, humor, memory and hope continue alongside it.
Little White Cross is ultimately less about tragedy than about how we carry it. Cilker has made an album willing to look directly at some deeply uncomfortable parts of contemporary life without turning suffering into spectacle. Her answer is neither optimism nor resignation, but attention: to the people in the stories, to the places where they happened, and to the small pieces of beauty that remain. It is a deeply human country record, and one that suggests that sometimes putting pain into a song is not an escape from darkness, but a way of finding your way through it. – Jason Felton