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Many artists are more appealing when they are hungry than after they’ve become rich and famous.

That was demonstrated this week by Alannah Myles, who appeared Monday at First Avenue, and Michelle Shocked, who performed Tuesday at the historic Orpheum Theatre. Each disappointed for different reasons.

Blues-folk singer Shocked, made a big impression with her first two albums and her solo performances at First Avenue and the Guthrie Theater. She’s a critics’ darling, not a best-selling star, but her record label has given her big bucks and artistic license. So last year she got ambitious and made a swing-oriented recording, Captain Swing, and this year she has hit the road with a six-man band.

It’s admirable that she wants to stretch out artistically – she said she didn’t want to preach to the converted – but her Orpheum performance was a comedown.

Shocked’s three solo numbers Tuesday were outstanding and a mandolin duet, “Jeff Davis,” with her father was a treat. But when she played tunes from “Captain Swing” with her band, the arrangements stood out – not her singing. The band overpowered her (especially the sax and trumpet) except on “Anchorage,” an old number.

Several other female Texas R&B singers, most notably Marcia Ball, have the vocal power to shine on this material, most of it written by Shocked.

Opening Shocked’s concert was John Wesley Harding, the freshest, most charming male folksinger to come along since Billy Bragg. On record, British singer-songwriter Harding, 24, comes across like Elvis Costello. In concert, he’s less serious. Tuesday he was a witty cynic and a hilarious pop-culture commentator.

He sang about being the bastard son of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, offered a straightforward folkie treatment of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” and brought the house down the half-full house with “When the Beatles in America[sic],” which sets the scenario of a Beatles’ reunion (a tour co-sponsored by Visa and Greenpeace, and a comeback album that sounds like ELO or XTC). He even ad-libbed a line about Minneapolis’ own Trip Shakespeare.