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He’s in the middle of planning his wedding for next weekend and putting in more work on a full-length album that’s eight years since his last one, but local singer-songwriter/poet/playwright R.B. Morris is taking time out to celebrate some new music tonight at The Laurel Theater in Knoxville.

For fans of Morris’s literary style of songwriting, “Empire” is the equivalent of a $20 crack rock to a junkie — it gets you off, but when the last note fades out, the listener is left fiending for more.

Not to worry, Morris said — with a little luck and some determination, the new record should be done soon.

“I think of ‘Empire’ as a musical document unto itself — a short story, and the full CD will be like the novel,” Morris told The Daily Times this week. “I’m working on it, and it’s kind of caught up for a moment. On one hand, I can say it’s finished, depending on whether or not I want to use further sessions that these five tracks came from.

“There’s some talk about possibly going back in and working on it in a different set-up, but I don’t know where that’s going to end up. It’s sort of hanging out there right now, but I’m only going to let it hang for so long.”

As for most of his works, it’s difficult to describe “Empire” and still do it justice as a body of work separate from whatever may follow. The man himself has long defied categorization, and even he admits that his body of work — poetry, stage plays, several albums worth of singer-songwriter driven folk and blues-rock — leaves many confounded as to how, exactly, to pin him down. There are a lot of labels that fit — from hard-drinking roustabout to scholarly writer-in-residence at the University of Tennessee (a position he currently occupies) to collaborator of some of the best musicians, known and unknown, in Knoxville and beyond.

Many East Tennesseans may have a passing knowledge of Morris as a musician, but most don’t realize just how much he’s respected by his peers. Singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams calls him “the greatest unknown songwriter in the country,” and country-rock maverick Steve Earle says Morris “is the reason I started writing poetry.”

Born at Fort Sanders, Morris has always made Knoxville his home, despite his occasional wanderings. He’s spent time in San Francisco, collaborating with the biographer of Jack Kerouac, and in Knoxville he’s taken up the cause of celebrating and clamoring for the recognition of Agee, Knoxville writer-extraordinaire who penned “A Death in the Family.”

His concerts are as hard to categorize as his music. His songwriting, and his spoken-word poetry, is starkly beautiful and haunting, and his solo acoustic shows usually hold audiences spellbound. There’s a melancholy sadness to his acoustic songs, and a shot of adrenaline to his rockers, all of which make up his three available records, “Take That Ride,” “Knoxville Sessions” and “Zeke and the Wheel.”

Tonight, Morris will perform with his long-time guitarist Hector Qirko, celebrating the release of “Empire.” Despite its brevity, it’s still a work of art unto itself, and Morris has taken pains to ensure that it stands both apart from and as a teaser for whatever may follow.

“I left some of my favorite pieces off, just trying to make it a musical documentary unto itself,” he said. “There’s a European theme there a little bit, and that will run across the whole CD itself. With the full-length, it’s all the same fabric; it’s just that with the smaller piece, I had to make some choices with what works and flows together, sequence-wise and in a smaller number.

“Thematically, it’s different than most of my previous work and most of what’s out there in terms of the European sort of theme. It’s art, in a way. Even on the EP, it hits on certain subjects, and there’s certainly been a lot of empires in Europe.”

The EP kicks off with “Buddha (In European Clothes),” the tale of a traveling minstrel or performer whose chameleon-esque existence enables him to slip in and out of courts and cities. Maybe it comes from Morris looking into the mirror; then again, maybe it’s about the devil. Either way, there’s a slow build of vague, Spanish-style guitar that interweaves with Morris’s voice to a climax of swirling and exotic soundscapes.

From there, it shifts to a bluesy shuffle behind spoken-word poetry on “Big Wheel/Vowels,” in which Morris name-checks Rimbaud ruminates on “wars, and the rumors of wars.” “Spy” is a menacing, growling rocker, with Morris lamenting “the spy in my brain” having to “explain everything I say,” the perfect counterbalance to “Empire,” the album’s high point. It’s a song that’s garnered adoration from fans ever since he debuted it in concert, a gentle, acoustic ballad of a crumbling life in a crumbling world.

The EP is capped by the beauty and wonder of “City,” gorgeous harmonies and beautiful guitar parts offering a glimpse of hope for whatever dread and despair may have preceded it.

Overall, Morris succeeds in improving on what he does best — painting pictures of strange landscapes, slightly off-kilter to the thinking man’s eye and troubling to the feeling man’s heart. His songs are populated by the spiritually hungry and, on occasion, the spiritually bankrupt. One can’t help but wonder how many aspects of his own personality he pours into each song; it’s safe to say that, given his dedication to creating art, that it might be quite a bit.

Such speculation, however, is one of the reasons he does what he does. Music, and to a greater extent, the art of which it’s a part of, is subjective. Because it’s his life’s work, however, it’s nice when it’s noticed — regardless of the interpretation behind it.

“Artistically, people treat me generally nice, and they seem to enjoy my work, but there’s no evidence that many people look very closely into it,” Morris told The Daily Times in an interview back in April. “Nobody’s ever reviewed my work, for instance. And maybe that’s OK; maybe it doesn’t get any better than that. Everybody would like to have a huge house and all adoring fans — that seems to be the quest for everybody, and I admit to wishing I could get a little more of that sometimes.

“When you decide to be an artist when you’re young, it’s a very romantic thing. You look at books with all of the masters and how they’re celebrated through the ages, but when you get down to the life of it, it’s a little different. You have to take some gratification just out of shaking things up and looking out at people with their eyes crossed and their brows knitted, wondering what the hell you’re about.

“If it makes them think and wonder, you’ve done part of the job,” Morris added. “I would rather present songs and poems and mixtures of both that make people consider them rather than just punching the buttons that are comfort for them.”