Without Rhyme--for a Reason : Music: The O’Kanes’ freewheeling approach to country includes occasional free verse. ‘It goes back to trying to write something honest and real,’ Kieran Kane says. ‘Try to use words you’d actually say.’

Listening to the O’Kanes music is a lot like veering off a superhighway to explore some inviting side road that snakes its way through God’s back yard. It carries you through breathtaking territory, and just when you expect to hit the main road again, the trail jags and leads instead to yet another eye-opening vista.

Through three albums and a handful of Top 10 singles, the Nashville-based duo has established itself as one of the most arresting new talents country music has produced in the ‘80s. The unrelated O’Kanes--Kieran Kane and Jamie O’Hara--carry on the tradition of the brothers Louvin and Everly via songs that defy convention at every corner and vocals that resurrect the much-neglected genre of two-part male harmonizing.

Their records--from their debut 1986 single, the sprightly “Oh Darlin,’ ” to their most recent, the devastating breakup tale “Tell Me I Was Dreaming”--feature a spare, mostly acoustic instrumental backing that spurns the superficial sheen and production weightiness other artists rely on to generate an illusion of substance.

While admirers marvel at their ability to churn out appealing, genuinely felt songs largely without resorting to such tried-and-true country-music topics as lyin’, cheatin’, drinkin’ and killin’--often dispensing with such songwriting basics as rhyme--the O’Kanes shrug it all off with characteristic humility.

“I don’t recall us ever sitting down and articulating that: ‘Let’s avoid all cliche and let’s avoid all expected routes,’ ” O’Hara, 39, said by phone from his home in Nashville during a few days’ break in their 40-date national tour with Emmylou Harris, which stops Saturday at Anaheim’s Celebrity Theatre.

“But I think unconsciously, in both of our hearts, we want to try to stay away from cliche, to be as direct and simple and honest as we possibly can. In and of itself, that will direct you away from cliche,” O’Hara said.

“It goes back to trying to write something honest and real,” said Kane, 40. “When we are writing songs and get to that point--’Where do we go from here?’--we try to think about what would you actually say here? Forget about rhyme--try to use words you’d actually say.

“And we are usually able to craft it together that way. Most people don’t notice (when lyrics) don’t rhyme, if it rings true. It’s fun to write like that. You’re a lot freer to use language you may not be able to use otherwise, if you lock yourself into a rhyme scheme.”

Case in point of how the duo peels back truths while skirting predictability is found in “This Ain’t Love” off their latest album, “Imagine That.”

I think about you night and day

I need you by my side

I’m lonely when you’re not around

I’m hollowed out inside

But this ain’t love”

“That cut may be one of my favorite O’Kanes records of all time,” Kane said. “It’s classic O’Kanes. . . . It started out unintentionally--we just had the guitar riff, then we began debunking all the myths (about love) in some way.”

Added O’Hara: “As it was taking shape, it became apparent the song was going to debunk cliches about how we define love. The deeper we got into that idea, the more and more I liked the song. In the creative process of songwriting, in the beginning it’s best to stay away from trying to decide what you are trying decide before you do it. Try your best to see where you are being led, rather than where you want (the song) to go. . . . A lot of people misunderstand that song and get really confused by it. It takes a particular type of mentality to get it, and I think the reason I love that song is exactly that, because those particular ideas run so deep in our culture. We are just bombarded by it.”

If that sounds like a downcast view of love and romance, O’Hara doesn’t intend it to be, and he resists the tag of “pessimistic country music” that one writer saddled them with. (The same writer, however, went on to say their music “nonetheless soothes and comforts the listener because it’s so darn pretty and irresistible.”)

“Hopefully the music is accurate; I don’t know if it’s pessimistic,” O’Hara said. “To me, living is difficult for all of us. I don’t think it’s pessimistic to report on heartache. For myself, I know that I am comforted by a really accurate sad song, because it articulates for me the sadness that I feel. As a consequence I feel better. Sad songs make me feel good. . . .

“I think some of the O’Kanes’ material is humorous, but I love songs like ‘Together Again’ and ‘I Fall to Pieces.’ When I hear that kind of stuff, it’s where I gravitate; when I hear that kind of wrenching soulfulness, I feel like, ‘Let’s try to write that.’ ”

Kane once remarked that there is “a lonesomeness to me in the music, and even on the bright side there’s underpinnings of sadness which goes back to the mountains, back to the Appalachians.”

It’s a comment that begs the question: What can a couple of Northern boys--one from Ohio, the other from New York--know about the sadness born of life in the Appalachians?

“I don’t think people from a rural Southern mountain background have a corner on sadness and the blues,” O’Hara said. “There’s all kinds of poverty and all kinds of sadness. It cuts across all economic strands of society; north, west, south, east--it doesn’t matter. There are such things as poverty of the soul, of the heart, all those things, and I think that’s what good country music gets at.”

The circuitous routes that brought Kane and O’Hara into country music, and ultimately to their partnership, may have something to do with their unconventional yet immediately accessible songwriting style.

Far from being native sons of the South immersed from birth in country music traditions, as their sound might suggest, the O’Kanes were born and bred Yankees: O’Hara grew up in Toledo; Kane was born in Queens and reared in Upstate New York. Both cited rock ‘n’ roll as their first musical love, but at the same time remember being exposed to country music early on, when the line between rock and country wasn’t as sharply drawn as it is today.

“When I first heard country music,” O’Hara said, “I didn’t know I was hearing country. My older sisters would buy early Elvis and Jerry Lee records, and they’d bring home Everly Brothers songs. I remember Elvis’ first Sun Records single, ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ and the flip side was (the Bill Monroe bluegrass standard) ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’ The flip side of Jerry Lee’s ‘Great Balls of Fire’ single was (the Hank Williams song) ‘You Win Again.’ ”

“It’s probably like Emmylou’s experience--I was not born into country music, but acquired a real appreciation for it as I grew older. . . . It’s beautiful, soulful music when done properly. It’s so direct; it can go right into your heart,” he said.

For Kane, there were two key events that redirected his focus from rock to country.

“Growing up in Upstate New York, I heard a lot of country on the jukeboxes in the joints when I was a kid, hanging around cowboys,” he said. “When I was about 12, my brother and I went to a hootenanny. We heard a bluegrass band and just went nuts. The next day he bought a banjo, I bought a mandolin. I had started out playing drums in a rock band, doing Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley stuff, but this bluegrass music turned my head around.

“Then when I was 17, I went to a Bill Monroe concert and heard Buck Owens, who was opening for Monroe, and he turned my life around. Here was rock with country and mountain music--everything I loved brought together.”

Though Kane spent eight years in Los Angeles trying to carve out a career, he moved to Nashville in the late ‘70s, where he took a job as a staff songwriter at Tree Music, one of country music’s biggest publishing houses.

There he met O’Hara, who had moved to Nashville to pursue a songwriting career not long after a knee injury ended the All-America high-school football star’s NFL aspirations. Individually, they had penned hits for the Judds, Alabama, Ronnie McDowell. The two began collaborating on songs and after a while decided to take a stab at performing.

Kane and O’Hara modeled themselves largely on singers who also wrote their own material, although O’Hara says he respects certain singers “who have the soul of a songwriter.”

Said Kane: “I think of country music as a singer-songwriter medium. Then there are the great singers: George Jones, Emmylou, Tammy Wynette. But the songs I always gravitated toward were the ones by people like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Buck Owens, because they wrote their own music. When Buck came on the radio, there was no question who it was.”

That sort of transcendent individualism hasn’t necessarily been the case recently. “Country went through a really dismal time (in the early ‘80s) when you could go down the charts and see that everything was produced and written by the same four or five people,” Kane noted. “Everybody was indistinguishable from one another. Now you’ve got more people like Garth Brooks and Clint Black” who are writing their own songs and spawning more distinctly personal styles.

That quality has been increasingly true of the O’Kanes sound to the extent that when they want to offer a song up for other performers to record, they find they can’t record a demo tape themselves like they used to.

“We still tend to pitch songs that I may write, or he writes, or we write together, that we just don’t feel comfortable with ourselves,” Kane said. “We can’t record it with both of us singing, because then people ask, ‘If it’s such a good song, why don’t they do it?’ ”

In keeping with their off-the-beaten-track style of songwriting, both members of the O’Kanes shy from typically cheery assessments of the future, possibly because the “Imagine That” album, despite being a creative step ahead of the previous two, was a commercial disappointment.

“When we finish touring in September,” Kane said, “I don’t have immediate plans for more touring. Who knows when we’ll record again? We don’t have a schedule. I’ll just get back on the songwriting routine, which is pretty conducive because I can write at home, whenever I feel like it. . . . My main (objective) right now is finishing out the summer (tour), then sitting down and talking about what the hell do we do now?”

O’Hara echoed the sense of uncertainty. “It’s one album at a time. We made this album and we’ll probably sit down soon and talk about whether we’ll make another one.”