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Love is a subject much considered by Nanci Griffith, 34, who likes to call herself "just a little folkabilly songwriter," and K.T. Oslin, who surprised everyone -- herself most of all -- by winning a Grammy in March for her hit RCA single 80's Ladies. It was from her first album, and Oslin is 46. "It's dreamlike," says Oslin, a sometime actress. "I feel like I'm playing the role of a country singer. But I'd rather be starting now than ending now." Both women were brought up in Texas; however, where Oslin's writing and performing are foursquare, Griffith is delicate but deliberate. She started writing in grade school, she says, "mainly out of self-defense, 'cause I was so lousy at guitar." She admires the work of such fiction writers as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, and in tunes like Love Wore a Halo (on her strong- selling MCA album Little Love Affairs), Griffith can be heard trying to chase that same magnolia-and-nightshade muse to ground.
Her songs, delivered in a winsome, not entirely wholesome voice, have a strange after-echo that makes them kissing cousins to the work of Lyle Lovett, 30, who has sung occasional harmony with Griffith but has more in common with an unorthodox satirist like Randy Newman. "I've never been to jail, never been arrested, and I don't do drugs at all," says Lovett, with no apparent regret. "It wouldn't work for me. But I do what I want with my music, so I get away with murder there." Raised in a Lutheran family outside Houston, Lovett, whose gentle eyes are set into the lean, long-jawed face of a back- alley shiv artist, acts straight but makes intrepid music. Listen to the recent Pontiac (MCA), and you can really hear him cut loose in tunes like If I Had a Boat: "The mystery masked man was smart/ He got himself a Tonto/ 'Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free/ But Tonto he was smarter/ And one day said kemo sabe/ Kiss my ass I bought a boat/ I'm going out to sea."
The whirligigs of sound woven by Jamie O'Hara, 37, and Kieran Kane, 38, go even deeper than the roots Travis usually cites. The O'Kanes, as the boys bill themselves, hail respectively from Toledo and Queens, N.Y., but they sing harmony like the Everly Brothers and play extended riffs on guitar and mandolin that kick tunes like One True Love out of the country and into the cosmos. Their two CBS albums (the recent Tired of the Runnin' has made it to No. 21 on the country charts and spawned a Top 5 single besides) are flawless but far from slick. At their frequent best, the O'Kanes can plunge back farther than Nashville, all the way to the spooky, spiritual mountain music of the Carter Family and the Tenneva Ramblers. "I don't recognize it," admitted a brand-new O'Kanes fan at a recent Rochester concert. "But I like it."
"People our generation and younger have grown up with a rock music attitude surrounding us," O'Hara says. "That means we share a rebelliousness and a willingness to take some chances." Those chances, even when they are as respectful as Travis' or as roughhouse as Steve Earle's, are already paying handsome dividends. There's new times in country at last. And good times too.