Ani DiFranco's 2002 solo performance at Carnegie Hall is something of another world.

The political edge is razor sharp, and the kinship between performer and audience is cosmic.

Released April 4, the new live album sounds like it's captured a moment in history.

You hear the politically charged songstress pouring her heart out with intensely interwoven lyrics and incredible six-string finger picking, but it's difficult to take it all in.

The concert, recorded just seven months after Sept. 11, may seem foreign to American listeners in 2006.

It's impossible to completely connect with the confusion and terror that followed the disaster, but DiFranco is addressing the moment head on, and the honesty is painful.

As alluring as DiFranco's performance is, it's difficult to listen to because there's an overwhelming tension oozing out of every note, clap, cheer and lyric.

In the album's liner notes, DiFranco writes that audiences were just starting to attend concerts again in large numbers, and "everyone I knew in New York was recovering from respiratory health problems after months of breathing in toxic air."

Before playing the first song — "God's Country" — she informs the audience she played Carnegie exactly one year before. And to break the butterflies of dwelling on what had changed during a year, DiFranco cracks, "I'm going to play everything I played last year, but backwards."

But as the show progresses, the jokes become less frequent and the mood is increasingly intense.

The climax comes near the album's conclusion when DiFranco performs a spoken-word piece entitled "Self Evident."

"Midway through the poem someone began to sob on the second balcony, a sound that, while it didn't make it to tape, was harrowingly audible from where I stood," DiFranco writes in the liner notes.

The speed of DiFranco's delivery fluctuates between rapid bursts of patriotic disgust and slow drawls about the scenery from railroad cars.

And the audience is right with DiFranco's words, cheering along with toasts "to our last drink of fossil fuels."

The new live album demands attention and shouldn't be taken lightly.

It was recorded at a time when Americans were unsure about their safety, rights and international relationship. And the most shocking aspect is that it's just one woman on stage with her guitar igniting such a sense of community among her fans.