A Do-It-Yourself Therapy Session

If you think of pop songs as recipes, some songwriters do all the work for us. There’s nothing left to do except add water and stir. Many of music’s most valuable writers, however, invite listeners to be active participants in the creative process.

Eels leader Mark Oliver Everett, who led his band in concert Sunday at the El Rey Theatre, fits in the latter group. Like such kindred spirits as Tom Waits and Randy Newman, Everett (who calls himself simply E) provides provocative clues but encourages us to draw our own conclusions about the often eccentric, troubled characters in his music.

You meet so many interesting case studies in Eels’ highly acclaimed new “Souljacker” album that it’s a bit like spending a day in a therapist’s waiting room. The album starts with a boy who keeps getting picked on at school because he’s got too much facial hair, and he’s looking for anyone (his mother, Jesus) to save him.

Who knows what the real problem is in “Dog Faced Boy”? But that’s what the therapist gets paid for. Meanwhile, the song invites the outsider in us all to weigh our own feelings of insecurity and think about how rational they are.

Elsewhere in “Souljacker,” we run across a friendly ghost, a teenage witch and a woman who drives the car while her husband sleeps. Some of the characters are simply confused and harmless, others so disoriented that they are a touch menacing. In one song, Everett speaks about someone “marking time on a broken watch.”

“Woman Driving, Man Sleeping,” one of the many songs from the album performed during Sunday’s 90-minute set, illustrates how Everett invites us to use our own experience and outlook to fill in the blanks.

The reason the woman is driving and the man is sleeping could simply be that it is her turn on a cross-country trip, but there’s something in the anxious melody that suggests something more relationship-defining is afoot.

Where Waits often romanticizes his characters’ plight by putting them in colorful late-night or barroom settings, Everett’s figures sometimes seem immobilized by their problems.

Backed by an adventurous three-piece band (guitarist Joe Gore, the single-named drummer Butch and bassist Koool G Murder) that played with inspired precision, whether aiming for a “Louie, Louie” rock primitivism or, more typically, sophisticated funk and rock trimmings a la prime Talking Heads, Everett sang in a convincing, straightforward style that allowed him to inject character into his tales without violating the mystery in them.

A bonus Sunday was the veteran performer’s stage manner, which seemed far more comfortable than three years ago in the same room. At that time, his attempts to disguise his uneasiness with quirky touches were self-conscious and distracting.

On Sunday, he put all his energy and emotion into the music, and it gave the show a crisper pace and the songs a more solid foundation. He still found time for playfulness, including a strong dose of Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On.”

What ultimately makes Everett’s music so affecting is its compassion, and that message was most obvious near the end of the set, when he turned to material from his most personal and affecting album, 1999’s “Electro-Shock Blues.”

In the inspiring “P.S. You Rock My World,” Everett notes how pressures and uncertainties can cause people to lose their will. In the song, however, he rejects such despair. “Maybe,” he sings hopefully, “it’s time to live.”