To focus an audience’s attention quickly, a playwright will sometimes raise the curtain on a silent, dimly lit stage, with the characters displaying serious expressions. Richard Buckner employs a similar device on his second album, Devotion + Doubt. The record opens with the atonal plink of a treated piano, which is repeated in a slow, stuttering figure and then joined by a few off-kilter taps on a snare. It’s a quiet yet unsettling sound, and just as its odd, narcotic effect draws in the listener, Buckner leans forward with a husky, weary whisper, “He said, ‘I’ll pull you down.’ ” Then, changing his expression slightly, he continues, “She said, ‘Yeah, I know you will.’ ” In the space of these two lines, the singer’s weariness shifts to a worldliness charged with romanticism, suggesting that the woman is eager to follow the man, no matter where he’s headed. She hears an invitation instead of a warning.

Buckner issues his lines with the subtle nuance of a masterful actor. There’s little theatricality in his delivery, and his deep voice sounds staggeringly fatigued. His tone is reminiscent of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, not because he mumbles but because the slow, measured quality of his phrasing suggests that the man in the song regrets what’s going to happen but is powerless to stop it. But when Buckner assumes the role of the woman, he’s a less saintly Eva Marie Saint; rather, he’s a bad girl infused with hope and a positive, daring energy.

“She said she still had some trouble left in her, and she wasn’t about to give in,” Buckner sings a few lines later. And when the song ends with the man insistently pledging his love—“I’ll pull along you for miles,” he sings—Buckner sounds just as convincing as he did in the opening line.

Throughout Devotion + Doubt, as on 1995’s outstanding Bloomed, Buckner proves extraordinarily gifted at imbuing his words with meaning. In song and in performance, he displays the kind of sureness and presence that have made enduring cult figures of such desolate tunesmiths as Leonard Cohen, Richard Thompson, and Townes Van Zandt (the last of whom is one of Buckner’s acknowledged heroes.)

Downhearted on the surface, the songs on Devotion + Doubt disturb the mind yet settle deep in the heart. Buckner sets his toner switch on deep blue and leaves it there, but he colors his lyrics with vibrant images that make every gently murmured word pulse with emotion. Although he’s offbeat in every sense, nearly every song nails a mood that enlivens his poetic point of view.

Buckner is far too peculiar to become a star. His songs don’t have choruses, and they unfold to a drowsy tempo. The music perfectly fits his words and his voice, but it’s far from anything currently heard on radio or on video channels. Nor will it appeal to everyone. Like the more abstract plays of Edward Albee or Jean Paul Sartre, Buckner’s music requires careful listening and a willingness to ignore conventions. Even for me, a late-coming but thoroughly convinced devotee, his music works only at certain times and in certain places. It’s not what I’d put on in the morning, nor would I listen to it while driving in the sun or during a neon-lit evening in the city. But late at night, with candles and quiet, it’s mesmerizing and transporting. For this alone, Buckner is destined to have the kind of devoted cult following that makes for a long and significant career.

His unusualness was played out recently in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest Music/Media Conference. Buckner joined a songwriting panel that included Nashville’s Jim Lauderdale and Kim Richey and Austin’s David Halley. All are interesting, completely commendable writers. But Lauderdale, Richey, and Halley have succeeded at finding fresh wrinkles in familiar formulas; Buckner dispenses with formula in search of a musical language of his own. His writing has little to do with melody, repetitive construction, or catchiness.

The songwriting panel smartly turned into what Nashvillians would describe as a guitar pull, with each songwriter taking a solo turn and then passing the baton down the line to the next performer. It was an interesting juxtaposition of styles, as a songwriting panel should be. But while listeners were likely to walk out singing a chorus by Lauderdale or Richey, they’d be hard-pressed to do that with Buckner’s songs.

As it turned out, some in the audience who were hearing Buckner for the first time didn’t relate at all. It wasn’t an easy setting for the listeners or for the singer; the bright, artificial glare of fluorescent bulbs was about as conducive to Buckner’s music as a rush-hour traffic jam. But he had fans there, and they hung on every word. Others, however, all but snickered; a trio of top-level Nashville music executives waited until Richey had sung her third song, then they hurried out the door. Buckner was next, but they’d already heard him do two songs, and that was enough.

After the panel ended, I met up with a friend in the hall. Curious about the goings-on inside, he asked what was wrong with Buckner. Nothing, I replied; his songs were quietly stunning, and his comments had been funny and insightful. The friend then told me he’d just been talking to the three Nashville execs, who had joked about how unbelievably bad Buckner’s performance was.

It’s too bad they weren’t introduced to him in a different setting, such as when he played a Saturday-night show in the Driskill Hotel, a grand, historic building in downtown Austin. With several hundred fans crammed into a room, all sitting cross-legged and shoulder-to-shoulder in the pitch-dark, Buckner stood before a microphone on a makeshift stage. Accompanied only by a keyboard player, a pedal steel, and his own acoustic guitar, he hypnotized the rapt audience with one subdued, emotionally charged song after another. No one spoke, and no one departed; after the singer finished, the crowd was left nearly speechless. It was a rare and special performance.

As a recording artist, Buckner aligns himself with unexpected producers and musicians, then allows them to play an important role in shaping the sound of his words. His debut was recorded in Austin with underground country legend Lloyd Maines, who first gained recognition as the most important member of Joe Ely’s bands in the 1970s. Maines set up a drum-less, bass-less string band for Buckner, but Bloomed nevertheless has more of a driving, rhythmic focus than Devotion + Doubt.

For his second album and major-label debut, Buckner tabbed bassist J.D. Foster as his producer. A veteran of the Los Angeles and Austin music scenes, Foster set up the San Francisco-based Buckner with Giant Sand, an Arizona-based group known for its airy, mystical folk-rock. As a result, there’s less of a center to the songs, the rhythm is much less recognizable. The sound is rambling and disjointed—sometimes it adds a magical flavor that fits Buckner’s minor-chord emphasis, but occasionally it distracts from the singular rhythm of his lyrics. It’s more experimental than Maines’ focused, red-eyed folk settings, but it’s not always as successful. Where Maines wrapped Buckner in sweet, ravaged melancholy, Foster and Giant Sand go for exposed nerves and raw, evocative mystery.

But in both cases, Buckner makes the best of who and what he has. He writes as if he has no choice but to follow his heart down its singular, lonely trail. As much as he warns others not to follow, they’re going to be there, pulling alongside him for miles and finding themselves in his words.