Lucinda, track by giddy track

“I’m a little neurotic, truth be known,” Lucinda Williams told the audience during her concert at El Rey Theatre on Wednesday. After a precisely timed pause, she added a dry, “Surprise, surprise.”

She was referring to the pages of lyrics on her music stand that serve as a security blanket during a long concert, and Wiliams’ willingness to joke about her image as a high-maintenance artiste was one of the many elements that made the show even better than promised.

It was the first of her five nights at the small theater, each one showcasing a different album from her illustrious catalog to be performed in its entirety. Working backward, she started with 2003’s “World Without Tears” and followed Thursday with “Essence” from 2001.

These “album concerts” have become a mini-trend lately, but since Williams is one of pop music’s most admired writers and performers, this series, which she’ll repeat in New York later this month, has “special occasion” stamped all over it.

There are lots of ways an artist can go with that mandate. Williams, a restless spirit who’s always reevaluating and rethinking her work, could have reinterpreted the songs to reflect new insights and perspectives on the material. She also could have enshrined it on a pedestal, performing it with reverent formality.

Instead, the Southern-bred, Los Angeles-based singer approached it like a kid jumping into ocean waves for the first time -- with unaffected joy. She and her band stayed fairly faithful to the recordings, but the performance had a sense of discovery, an edge of the excitement you feel when you reunite with an old friend.

And the discipline imposed by the albums’ architecture created its own dynamic. At one point Wednesday, Williams paused and remarked, “It’s interesting to see the structure of this. It’s an interesting sequence.”

She shouldn’t have been surprised. Williams actually anticipated this movement as long ago as 1988, when she played “Lucinda Williams,” the breakthrough album that included the Mary Chapin Carpenter hit “Passionate Kisses,” as a unified work at the old Palomino club.

A notorious -- some might say neurotic -- perfectionist, she doesn’t assemble her albums casually, and their meticulous design, reflecting her discipline as a student of high literature as well as folk forms, made the hourlong live presentations as absorbing as a fine novella.

“World Without Tears” was especially potent, with its rawness and its wide range of emotion and musical color.

Her band, which includes longtime guitarist Doug Pettibone and two members of different editions of the Eels, drummer Butch Norton and guitarist-keyboardist Chet Lyster, relished the challenges, attacking the free-form jam that comes after Williams demands “just play me John Coltane” and laying back on the elegant, swirling, Curtis Mayfield/Marvin Gaye-inspired background of “American Dream.”

“Essence” is more uniform and sustained in its tone of downbeat loneliness, a quality the group captured with elegant finesse. But by Thursday they seemed to be hitting their stride, and they tore into the album’s hard-rocking moments with ferocious enthusiasm.

Beyond the musical rewards, Williams offered a constant running commentary, speaking far more than usual about the meanings and circumstances of her songs. This enlightened but never demystified these eloquent, resonant poems of heartache and desire.

A preordained set of songs doesn’t admit much spontaneity, so Williams took care of that with second sets each night, offering some material from (and left off of) her latest album, “West,” and elsewhere in her voluminous songbook. A new one, the fierce, punkabilly “Honey Bee,” shook the house both nights, as did a version of Fats Domino’s “I Live My Life.”

She was joined by a parade of friends (Shelby Lynne and Ann Wilson on Wednesday, Tim Easton, Jim Lauderdale, Mike Stinson and Greg Dulli on Thursday), and in these freewheeling hours Williams exerted a vision that melted boundaries between genres.

She sang a song by the electronic duo Thievery Corporation with lyrics by the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne and teamed with Dulli on the Johnny and June Carter Cash hit “Jackson.” In “Unsuffer Me,” she evoked Jim Morrison on Wednesday and, in perhaps the single most focused, intense moment of the run so far, a shamanistic Patti Smith on Thursday.

But that’s only so far. A little past midnight on Thursday, Williams and company seemed to be just warming up.

richard.cromelin@latimes.com

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Lucinda Williams

Where: El Rey Theatre, 5515 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Today (“Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”), Sunday, (“Sweet Old World”), Monday (“Lucinda Williams”), all at 8 p.m.

Price: $35 each night

Contact: (323) 936-6400