By Michael Gaither

Hard work and perseverance pay off. Case in point: Songwriter Margo Cilker, who headlines this Sunday evening at Moe’s Alley in Santa Cruz. I caught up with her last week as she was packing for her latest tour.

The fifth-generation Santa Clara Valley native now calls Oregon home. “I left the Bay Area for college when I was 18,” she recalled. “But I’d go back to my parents’ house periodically to work and re-up my bank account, so I could keep touring more.”

“I started writing my own songs when I was still in high school, and then in college I started playing out in coffeehouses and open mic nights. Hotel Utah (in San Francisco) is one of the first places I played. It was fun recently to even revisit some of my old booking emails from those days. I was really green,” she laughed and remembered.

She’s also no stranger to Santa Cruz. “I used to tag along with bands who played the Westside farmers market. We’d do old country, blues, and traditional songs through the lens of California hippies. That was good training,” she says, “because I knew I wanted to keep writing my own material, and I was learning how to do it through all these roots musicians who we all kinda looked towards.”Post-college and then married to a fellow artist, Margo and her husband, songwriter Forrest VanTuyl, settled in the Pacific Northwest and continued to tour, often sharing a band or backing each other up (she played bass in his band). “We had this cooperative thing where we could tour together,” she says. They moved up the circuit, doing hybrid six-week tours that frequently mixed “background music gigs” (mostly performing cover tunes) with club or listening rooms (where they performed their original songs). It’s a path that many musicians make. But, she adds, “there’s a point where you’re pouring so much energy into your original songs that you want to just play what you’ve written.”

Two things happened to nudge that along: Her second album, “Valley of Hearts Delight.” And the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I put a lot of resources into that record in 2019,” she says. “And it was ready to go in March of 2020. It was a different landscape to try to find a label and release it at that time. But I wasn’t in a hurry. I wanted to give it care and attention. If you put that much into your career and your life, you have to give it its due effort.”

As an aside. I seriously can’t count how many artists we’ve talked to at KPIG who had a record ready at the start of COVID and then said, “OK, now what? I guess we’ll stay home and perform to a computer screen.”

For Margo, the end of the pandemic meant it was time to “level up” and just focus on her original material, as she’s doing with her headlining shows like this Sunday at Moe’s Alley. However, she’ll still perform the occasional cover of an influential artist. “I select covers that I like to play. I used to frequently do, for example, ‘House of the Rising Sun,’ which is admittedly low-hanging fruit,” she says as she laughs. “And now I’ll go, ‘I’m going to play this Joe Ely song instead.’”

Michael Gaither is a performing songwriter, DJ at KPIG radio, and in a previous life was also a writer for The Santa Cruz Sentinel.