The acclaimed musician team of Nicole Olney and Xander Hitzig will perform with Drew Martin at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 3 at the ProArts Playhouse. Jenny Fuller/Courtesy photo

When the dynamic duo of Xander Hitzig and Nicole Olney, who perform as Desert Hollow, released their debut “Thirsty” EP, they received rave reviews.

PopMatters praised it as a “refreshing blend of old-timey country folk, blood harmonies, and knee-slapping hoedowns.” Hobo On the Tracks noted it was resplendent with music, “that is refreshing, melodic, full of hooks and marvelous harmonies.” And an NPR review evoked the spirit of legends Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris.

“Flaunting a Gram and Emmylou-like confidence in their delivery, one is pulled back through the decades in a time machine made of stringed instruments only to land in present day Los Angeles’ alt-country scene.”

“Graham Parsons is definitely one of my heroes,” says Hitzig. “I don’t know how much we sound like them, but they’re definitely both up there in the highest caliber of what they did, and Emmylou’s still playing.”

Living together on Maui since 2020, they will perform at the ProArts Playhouse on Jan. 3 in Kihei on a bill with Drew Martin, who has been called “Maui’s answer to Bob Dylan.”

A member of the Brownchicken Browncow Stringband, Hitzig began performing with Olney a few years after they met. The NPR review noted: “When the two come together in harmony, it’s as if they have known each other all their lives.”

They chose their band name to signify their roots. “Nicole’s from the (California) desert, and I’m from West Virginia, where there’s a lot of hollows,” he explains.

A talented Americana folk roots musician who plays guitar, fiddle, banjo, penny whistle, kazoo and mandolin on their debut recording, Hitzig grew up in the Appalachians where he “learned a lot of old time stuff and bluegrass. So what we do tends to have a sort of bluegrass flair.”

“But it also has that Southwest kind of high lonesome sound to it,” Olney adds. “It kind of reckons back to where we both come from. So it’s kind of like this Appalachian meets this high lonesome kind of cowboy sound, and it’s evolved from there.”

Along with their originals, they will include a few covers in their sets ranging from songs by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys and Blaze Foley to bluegrass star Del McCoury, “and we do The Band’s ‘The Weight’ sometimes,” he says.

They have a wonderful version of Foley’s “Clay Pigeons” on YouTube, filmed in the Makawao Forest Reserve, and they have a great cover online of Dylan’s “Ain’t Me Babe” shot on Maui with a bunch of friends.

Backing them on their “Thirsty” EP, friends helping out included Maui’s celebrated bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson and Nashville’s Johnny Hawthorn on steel guitar.

Besides their duo and playing with Brownchicken Browncow, multi-instrumentalist Hitzig has been touring with Lukas Nelson. “I’ve been playing some fiddle for Lucas Nelson,” he says. “I went on tour with him last summer, and he asked me to come out with him again this summer.”

Olney admires her partner’s “multi-instrumental mastery, and he’s also an incredible songwriter,” she says. “He writes songs, he sings harmony, he plays just about everything with strings. And he’s kind of tireless in his effort to kind of try to find the best way or the coolest sounding way to express a new song.”

Hitzeg is equally impressed with Olney’s talent.

“Nicole brings to the table some of the most beautiful vocal melodies, and she thinks really out of the box with her chord progressions of the songs she writes and her vocal melodies. One of her true masteries is her writing, her lyrics, her poetry. It’s just unbelievable. And she’s an incredible harmony singer as well.”

They’ve been working for a while on a follow-up to “Thirsty,” and plan on releasing an album in early 2025.

“It’s almost finished,” he says. “We’re kind of just painting on the finishing touches. We’ve been working on it for a little over two years. And it’s a little hard sometimes because about a year in, we started getting really excited about it and talking about it. Then a lot of our friends who regularly come to see us at Mahalo Aleworks shows started getting a little impatient.

“They’re like, ‘So when are we going to hear these new tracks?’ We’ve been really taking our time with it, which feels kind of difficult in this day and age. But we really just wanted to honor these songs and express them properly. We’ve been really stoked with how they’re turning out. It’s a bit of a bigger sound than just the duet, because we have some drums and bass and some electric guitar and some other instrumentation. It’s just sounding really cool, and we’re really excited that we’ve taken our time to do it.”

Desert Hollow will perform at the ProArts Playhouse with Drew Martin at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 3. Tickets range from $20 to $35, with a $5 discount for kama’aina. They also perform from 6-8 p.m. on alternating Thursdays at the Mahalo Aleworks.