Richard Buckner takes long road to Atlanta

“They have a million-mile club,” Buckner says. “I don’t know if I’ll hit that mark. But I’ll tell you, at my local Toyota dealership, I am a celebrity.”

The tour will bring him to the Earl in East Atlanta on Tuesday, marking the first time he’s come around in several years. But Buckner allows that he’s been eager to get back and visit some old friends.

Before he recorded his debut album, “Bloomed,” in the early ’90s, he briefly lived in Atlanta and worked at A Capella Books in Little Five Points. Many of the songs on “Bloomed” come from that time, when he would often keep a guitar behind the counter at the store.

Some 15 years and seven albums on, Buckner’s career has taken a number of twists and turns. Two well-regarded major label releases, “Devotion + Doubt” (MCA, 1997) and “Since” (MCA, 1998), made him a darling of Americana fans.

But beginning in 2000 with “The Hill,” a song cycle based on Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology,” his music swayed in a more experimental direction, and his approach to recording and performing became more fiercely independent.

At Variety Playhouse in 2006, Buckner was accompanied by former Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard, and came armed with array of electronic gizmos — playing a looping, nonstop set, and surrounding his booming, expressive voice in echoing, sometimes clamorous layers of sound.

“I still do one long set,” Buckner says. “But there’s a little less noise experimentation going on. Last tour, I had seven guitars. I only have three guitars this time.”

His two most recent albums, “Dents and Shells” and “Meadow,” are on Merge Records, the indie label that’s home to artists such as Spoon, Arcade Fire, M. Ward, and She & Him.

Earlier this year, Merge released three of Buckner’s out-of-print recordings, “Bloomed,” “The Hill,” and “Impasse” as digital downloads, and he went out on a tour in April. But before that, he’d been on hiatus, mostly because he was getting “freaked-out about by crowds,” he says.

A couple of years ago, he moved from an apartment in the tough Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn to a house in Kingston, N.Y., a small town on the Hudson River, where he lives with his girlfriend, Jill, a textile artist.

Lately, he’s been working day jobs to make ends meet, including a stint on a road crew, which he hated. “When I got home at night, all I wanted to do was drink vodka and go to bed and cry.”

He liked driving a forklift much better. “It’s a fun job. You’re driving backwards and lifting things.”

Still, last year, Buckner completed a solo score for the film “Dream Boy,” based on the 1995 novel by Atlanta writer and Emory professor Jim Grimsley.

“It was really a cool, new way to do music,” Buckner says. “It set me off in another direction, once I got back to my own stuff. I’m catching up on a couple of years of ideas and getting them together for the next record.”

It will be a DIY project that he’ll be working on in his home studio, starting later this year. “There’s no budget to hire a producer this time or to go into a real studio. I’m going to do as much as I can myself, and if I need a drummer or a bass player, I’ll get someone. If it wasn’t for home recording, I wouldn’t be doing this right now.”

Though he’s certainly best known for his songwriting and singing, Buckner says he owned a four-track cassette recorder before he could play guitar.

“Honestly, it’s the only reason I’m a musician,” he says. “It’s not about writing, it’s about making sounds.

“I can remember in high school, I had a friend who was in a band, and he had a Gibson Explorer and a giant amp. I couldn’t play then. But I did discover that you could take the guitar and lean it up against the amp and turn it up loud and get this really great, Lou Reed ‘Metal Machine Music’ stuff. That’s what I fell in love with.”

Concert preview

Richard Buckner

8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept 29, $10. The EARL, 488 Flat Shoals Ave. S.E., East Atlanta, 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com