The blossoming talents of this fertile collaboration can be heard on their new CD, Gone to Seed, a lovingly hand-packaged seven-song EP of finely etched musical portraits sung and played with heart and spirit. Recorded at Austin's Cedar Creek Studios, where such classic albums as Home by The Dixie Chicks have been created, it's a collection that invests Texas roots music with both echoes of the past and a contemporary élan. The voices of Walker and Wilson interweave with the instruments into a luscious tapestry on "John Henry" (which updates folk themes in the fashion of The Band's Robbie Robertson), character studies like "Rosaline" and "Dead End," the heartbreak tale of "The Ballad of the Mexican Guardrail" and the classic lament of "It'll Get Better" (a high-tech folk song co-written by the two via text messages and voicemail). Serving as bookends to the whole affair are Wilson's songs "Wallace Pack Saturday" and "Michael," written for her brother — an All-American boy who wound up serving a three-year prison term after killing a man in a late-night auto accident. Suffused with harmonic richness and lyrical elegance, Gone to Seed is a bumper crop of talent and musical promise.

Walker and Wilson both grew up in small Texas towns listening to "country music when it was still good," as Walker observes, and met and started making music while attending Texas A&M University. He hails from Crawford in Central Texas and began playing music at age four on the drums and piano. She grew up in Sealy in Southeast Texas near Houston in a family where everyone sang. "I naturally sang harmony lines when listening to radio since I was seven or eight, says Wilson. "I never knew that some people couldn't hold a tune until I got away to college."

In addition to classic country artists her father loved like Bob Wills and Johnny Cash, Wilson was also weaned on the music of Bruce Springsteen. "My father always said that he's a country songwriter who plays rock'n'roll," she recalls.

For Walker, other early influences include his father's love of poetry and skills as a public speaker. "He's a very eloquent man," he notes. As well, his reading of the works of Joseph Campbell helped develop both his personal viewpoint and sense of the world around him. "I learned a lot about being a better person."

The band's name comes from a fictional creature, like the famed Jackalope, that Walker's father playfully warned him to avoid when exploring as a kid along Bluff Creek just outside Crawford. Inhabiting steep slopes thanks to longer legs on one side of its body than the other, this folklore animal provided an ideal moniker for an act that limns the edges and heights of country and folk and invests real life tales with mythic resonance.

A pivotal event for the both of them was getting their first guitar as a Christmas present - for Walker when he was 16 and Wilson during her sophomore year in college. And it was all but fated by family tradition that they would both attend Texas A&M University. By the time Walker reached college, he had started writing songs after hearing Texas singer-songwriter Bruce Robison's album Wrapped, and then went on to become a fan of the work of songwriters like Lyle Lovett and Gram Parsons. Wilson also started writing songs soon after getting a guitar, initially as a private endeavor. "Nobody knew that I played, not even my boyfriend. I would just sit in my room and play," she recalls.

Eventually, she went public with her talent at Zapato's, a restaurant and club that was the singer-songwriter haven in College Station. Also playing that night was Walker with an early version of The Sidehill Gougers. Wilson first caught his ear as she sang along in the audience with a performer doing the "The Weight" by The Band. "I heard this girl singing on the chorus, and her voice just snapped my head around," he recalls. When she got up onstage, "I immediately thought, holy shit, this girl is good."

Wilson was asked to open for The Sidehill Gougers at their next gig and soon joined the band. A vocal and creative collaboration between Walker and Wilson blossomed as he introduced her to Parsons and Harris and the singing and songwriting of Patty Griffin, among others. Her first show with the group was opening for legendary singer-songwriters Steve Young and Steven Fromholz. Soon after, Texas music veteran Larry Joe Taylor heard them and offered to produce their first recordings.

By the time Walker and Wilson graduated, it was clear to both that following their musical muses together was their only career choice. They both settled in Central Texas, and The Sidehill Gougers began building an audience throughout the Lone Star State and in Oklahoma. And now, with the release of Gone To Seed, the act is ready to ascend to a national if not international stage.

Their appeal is not just their lovingly and beautifully crafted songs and the way the voices of Walker and Wilson naturally intertwine, but also the purity found in both their sound and creative intent. "I think if you do something sincere and real, something good will come out of it," notes Walker.

"It's something that you do because it's what you have to do. It gets in your blood," adds Wilson.

"It's also something that enriches every aspect of our lives," concludes Walker. And anyone who hears Gone To Seed will also find their lives duly enriched as well.

A Sidehill Gouger always goes around the mountain in the same direction, and its legs have evolved to actually be longer on one side of the body. The are divided into two categories: "Clockwise" and "Counter." All gouger social interaction is based on leg morphology.

Ultimately, urbanization with flatten, smooth and pave over all the land - including the hills and mountains. And gougers just can't stand to live in a world without hills.