"There, Vic," he tells his wife, "you can see the planets now."
Marching behind him down the rocky hill just outside the house and recording studio they've named Chaparral Bottoms, Victoria Williams has her eyes cast down toward the brush at her feet. She's talking about tea, cowboy tea or Mormon tea or squaw tea or whatever it is the locals call the syrupy brew made from this same brush, stretching endlessly to the horizon. Williams snaps off a twig, examines the dry redness inside and puts it to her tongue. "Tastes like doctor's office," she says with a sour look.

Chaparral Bottoms is only a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, but it's far enough from the city and its airwaves and microwaves to provide periods of simplicity and solitude. Which is exactly what the two were looking for when they bought the house four years ago. As her picturesque, understated songs would suggest, the Louisiana-born Williams thrives on such seclusion. For Olson, the move provided an escape from the labels, lawyers, managers, tour schedules, overwhelming debt and unmet expectations that he endured for a decade as a primary songwriter in the Jayhawks, the critically acclaimed Minnesota band he quit in 1995.

In Joshua Tree, the couple appears to have found their ideal medium, a place to function comfortably outside the rigors of the music business while still being granted access. And they've been able to have it both ways: Williams remains an acclaimed and prized artist for the Atlantic label, which released her Musings of a Creekdipper CD last month. Olson, meanwhile, is selling his first solo project, The Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers, out of a back bedroom here via mail order and his web site.

Back in 1995, when the Jayhawks released Tomorrow the Green Grass on American Recordings, the band's debt was approaching $1 million. Now, with only modest sales, Olson's solo disc has already broken even.

"With the Jayhawks, it was the carrot and the stick kind of deal," he says. "I was happy with the music we made, and I was into playing, but there were expectations. And I wasn't happy being in something that was below the expectations."

At the heart of both Creekdipper releases is what Bob Dylan has taken to calling "old-timey music": the eternal folk elements of an acoustic guitar, some thoughtful words and a well-crafted harmony. But while Olson (joined on his disc by Williams and fiddler Mike "Razz" Russell) chooses simple acoustic arrangements that fall squarely within the No Depression zeitgeist, Williams's muse just as often manifests itself through torch songs and tracks as festive as show tunes.

So, despite the similarity in titles and a shared love song ("Hummingbird"), the two releases are strikingly different. And that is true even if many of the songs began life here at homey Chaparral Bottoms, with Williams's high, loving drawl, or Olson's warm and reedy voice serenading their three large dogs, Ruby, Mollie and Solo.

Williams was the first to travel out to the desert. For two years, she rented a cabin in nearby Pioneer Town, in search of peace and solitude. After she married Olson four years ago, they found this house and still haven't bothered to hook up the cable to the television that they now use solely to watch videos of old movies.

"I'm a recluse at times, and that means a total recluse," says Williams, dressed in baggy denim overalls, her long, parted hair revealing a pouty smile. "Poor Mark can't even be around. It's like I have to be really alone. Then I like to go share what I found."

Williams is sipping hot Chaparral Bottoms tea, her own twist on the local brew, but with added ginger and licorice. ("Licorice is a natural antidepressant," she says.) As Olson finishes heating up the spicy gumbo dinner she prepared earlier in the kitchen, Williams settles onto a couch in the living room. She restlessly changes position as she speaks -- slouching, then sitting up, hugging a cushion, sliding to the floor -- as she describes the uncommon travails of making Musings of a Creekdipper with the multiple sclerosis that still constricts her life. The erratic nature of the muscle disease means that though she marched easily up and down the hill this afternoon, six months ago she could barely walk.

"I've been through a lot in the last two years. I had some bad attacks of it where I couldn't walk or anything," she says, sitting right beside the old tube equipment and handmade microphones of the home studio. "I lost some friends. Just life experiences, as far as going through any of those exasperations where you don't know if you're ever going to walk again. Is this going to last? Am I going to walk again? All those kinds of scary thoughts that make you think past the mortal coil that we are in -- the fact that we're all going to die. So strengthening the old spirit's been good."