Is it country music? Yes and no

In his recordings, Bonnie “Prince” Billy recounts tales of a world so quiet yet febrile with emotion, so intimate and broken, and often so deep into a kind of forbidden Americana that just listening to them seems like an invasion -- as if you’ve happened upon an Appalachian cabin to hear a man singing warbled histories to his family, then eased the door open to find him alone in an empty room.

But at the Rhino Records store in Westwood this week, a smiling, affable Bonnie (it’s OK to call him that) -- a.k.a. Louisville indie-folk iconoclast Will Oldham -- took to the makeshift stage with a four-piece band behind him, all of them dressed in black denim overalls like his own. He plugged in an electric guitar and dug in to show that these are, in fact, social songs. That they’re about sharing with people. That they’re almost about rock ‘n’ roll.

Not that it’s that much more comfortable to be listening to “Riding,” one of his songs from the early ‘90s. Even live, that feeling of overwrought intimacy creeps in when he half-mumbles the song of sibling incest:

Who you gonna ride with boy

All dressed up and with that look of joy

I’m gonna bring my sister Lisa.

But in public the song has a humor and storytelling quality that is not obvious on the painfully quiet album.

And the desperate jilted love song “Wolf Among Wolves,” from his newest album, “Masters and Everyone,” broke into a band-gang chorus, with drummer Chris Freeland, bassist and brother Paul Oldham, accordionist Cynthia Hopkins and guitarist David Bird cutting loose with big chords and loud wolf-howl backup.

Afterward, in the break room at Rhino, the 33-year-old Bonnie acknowledges that the rock treatment is a change. Sort of.

“Well, the records are just trying to get the songs across,” he half-whispers, blond curls twisting off his temples and almost reaching the top of his balding head. “And then live we’re just trying to spend time together.”

He’s interrupted by the sound of his new song, “Even if Love,” coming over the store sound system. “To play music like this [the album version] every night wouldn’t be very fun. It’d be like work,” he adds.

Before he was the Shakespearean-cum-Kentuckian Bonnie “Prince” Billy (the quotes are part of the name), Oldham began exploring idioms beyond his years as a 17-year-old actor in John Sayles’ 1987 film “Matewan.” He starred, in makeup, as the elderly miner whose flashbacks provide the narration for the story. This began a series of roles as miners, including in the TV film “Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure” and the 1990 film “Thousand Pieces of Gold.”

At the same time, Oldham began playing guitar music loosely affiliated with the so-called “anti-folk” movement. Oldham’s was an intensely private world that appealed to fans of home-recorded super-indie and country-inflected alt-rockers such as Sebadoh. His 1992 debut single, “Ohio Riverboat Man,” recorded solo under the name Palace Songs, established a crackly, whispery, lo-fi eccentric whom most listeners assumed was an old man.

A 1993 album with Todd Brashear, “There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You,” recorded as Palace Brothers, tended to make instant fans of listeners for its troubling characters, a rural-feeling litany of drunks and sinners, debauchery of biblical proportion, and intense love affairs gone bad or just plain gone.

Since then, there has been a profusion of albums and singles as Palace, Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Will Oldham, Joya and now three albums as Bonnie. They vary slightly in style and content, but not much, and their one constant is Oldham’s delivery, making every syllable sound like a peg on which whole worlds hang.

“We spent our honeymoon following him around from state to state,” says Russell Pierce, 27, of Santa Monica, one of the roughly 250 fans on hand at Rhino. “We heard his music and thought: This is it.” Adds his wife, Critter Pierce, 28, “We actually used one of his songs, ‘May It Always Be,’ from ‘Ease on Down the Road,’ in our wedding.”

Still, even Oldham sometimes feels his music is too introverted. He says that he didn’t even want to put “Masters and Everyone” out because he thought it was depressing, but after being encouraged by friends, including singers PJ Harvey and Marianne Faithfull (who included one of his songs on her last album), he let go of it.

Oldham is not married and has no children, but he is part of a close music community in Louisville. Seen live, Bonnie exudes a much more city-based, alt-country vibe. Indeed, for all his music’s rural feel and Appalachian/Olde English language, Oldham is a bit cagey about whether or not this is really country music.

“I just don’t know what the difference is between the country and the city, for the most part,” he says seriously, in his quiet, distracted way. “Louisville is just the Ohio River Valley. There’s no real mountains around there. There’s like the Nobs right across the river in Indiana. And it’s a little bit hilly.”

Then he cracks a slight smile.