I Dream AHighway

MARGO Cilker isn’t home right now. She’s on a ranch near the Columbia River Gorge in eastern Washington with her husband, fellow songwriter Forrest Van Tuyl. The couple are wintering here, having made the four-and-a-half-hour trek from their base in northern Oregon. It’s still pretty early – 9am in this outpost of the Pacific Northwest – but Cilker has been up and about for some time. “I was just getting the fire stoked,” she says, against a tasteful backdrop of panelled timber. “We decided to change the scenery for the winter. The Columbia River has been a passageway for humans for so many thousands of years. It’s spectacular. There’s just a really cool energy up here.”

Given Cilker’s inherent wanderlust, it’s fitting that Uncut catches her between stations, in a temporary space. The peripatetic pull of her life floods into every corner of her just-released debut, Pohorylle. It’s shaped by Cilker’s travels through the likes of California, Montana, Oregon, South Carolina, her beloved Basque Country and even parts of the UK.

“I have a very fluid notion of home,” she explains. “I’ve always been curious and I grew up in a very sheltered, suburban place, where my friends’ parents had white-collar jobs and it was all very cookie-cutter . I wanted to peek around that and see what else was out there. So I would just travel around with my backpack and guitar. I’m very at home in the old town of Bilbao, drinking white wine with my friends, speaking in Spanish. I’m at home in California under the redwood trees and swimming in the feels like a journey to where I am now.”