If I could fuck a mountain, Lord, I would fuck a mountain, Will Oldham once sang, long ago, when the question of whether or not he was for real was a more wide-open one.

Now that line's been pressed between hard covers and claimed for literature, along with the words to over 200 other Oldham compositions, in Songs of Love and Horror: Collected Lyrics of Will Oldham, available in better bookstores by the time you read this.

When I visit Oldham in September at one of two houses he owns in Louisville, Kentucky, there's a box of advance copies from W. W. Norton in the hallway and another one on a table in the living room, under an old cowboy hat. Oldham doesn't quite know what to say about the book yet. Maybe it's a map to where the songs came from. Maybe the experience of picking it up will rewire somebody's brain the way Nick Cave's first novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, did for Oldham in the early '90s, just before he started making records, when he was adrift between school and work and life and “a little perplexed as to what my place in the world could possibly be.”

Coat, $5,350, by Berluti / Jumpsuit, $689, by Bode / Hat, his own

He's 48 now. He's been a working musician for 25 years—under various permutations of the band name Palace Brothers at first, then as Bonnie “Prince” Billy—and if he's less perplexed about his place in the world, you wouldn't know it. His sly, rootless roots music has outlived every voguish rock-critical category people have tried to lump it into—lo-fi, alt-country, freak folk—and yet he still feels like he's “wading upstream” professionally. He's boyishly slight, wearing wool clogs and a long-sleeve thermal adorned with the silk-screened image of a cracked rib cage and an anatomically correct human heart. Around the turn of the century he started going bald on top and grew a castaway's beard, as if in compensation. Today all that's left of the beard is a bushy mustache. When he takes off his hat, he looks like he's about to tell you some bad news about a mining accident.

Oldham's other house—the one where he and his wife, artist Elsa Hansen Oldham, actually sleep—is two blocks from here. This house is where they work. Oldham has recorded a few of his past several albums on or near the couch I'm sitting on, including last year's monumental Merle Haggard tribute, Best Troubadour. When musician friends pass through town on tour, he offers up the back bedroom, or the attic, or the floor. Last year he put up Jonathan Richman, a living legend of the pre-punk era. They met at an Oldham show in Grass Valley, California, a few years earlier, then struck up a correspondence by mail. “He's not an e-mailer. He's not a cell-phone person,” Oldham says. They exchanged letters, and when Richman announced a tour with a Louisville date, Oldham invited him to crash here. The next morning Richman sat on this couch with a notebook, studying Sanskrit, because that is apparently a thing Jonathan Richman does now; when Oldham had to step out to buy laundry detergent, Richman came along with his guitar and serenaded Oldham all the way to the drugstore and back, as if reprising his role as the one-man Greek chorus from There's Something About Mary.

Coat, $9,765, by Givenchy / Shirt, $1,100, by Dries Van Noten

Richman recorded an album's worth of propulsive, minimal, Velvets-esque songs with a rock band called the Modern Lovers, then mostly turned his back on loud music, supposedly out of concern for his audience's hearing. Now he tours with a drummer and an acoustic guitar, as if mocking electrified music's macho will to power. It's never quite made sense, but it makes sense to Oldham. “I think I share more things with [Richman] than most people in music you could think of,” he says.