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“I’d say it’s been an interesting evening, wouldn’t you?” No one argued the point with Michelle Shocked, whose comment was delivered with a shared sense of wonder, not ego, before a grassroots crowd of 400 at the Middle East Sunday.

She had just passed the two-hour mark with “Memories of East Texas,” interrupted with an aside about her awkwardly learning to drive. “It’s not much, but it’s a very true story,” she noted,” and that’s got to count for something these days.”

Indeed, it does. Rejected by her record label, on the brink of securing a new one, and taking her music straight to the people, Shocked gave her most powerfully open-hearted local show in memory.

“I know it’s not the ‘90s thing to do, to say ‘I love you’ to a roomful of strangers,” Shocked said with a pause after segueing from her old hit “Anchorage” to the traditional love song, “The Water is Wide” (which had been sung at her wedding). But that didn’t stop her from graciously thanking both the audience and her band, which included guitarist, Fiachna Ó Braonáin and bassist/bouzouki player, Peter O’Toole from Ireland’s Hothouse Flowers.

Shocked is on the homestretch of a two-month jaunt with her Hothouse friends (free because that band is taking most of 1994 off, and possibly on tap for Shocked’s Newport Folk Festival return) and Los Angeles drummer, Cedric Anderson. They lent concise, sympathetic, and energized support.

Following Toronto’s overly cute but talented Moxy Fruvious (who scored with a rap based on Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham), Shocked began her set with a more sobering challenge. She spent the first hour playing all of her new Kind Hearted Woman CD – only a few songs familiar to fans from past shows. After three stark solo tunes, strummed on her Fender Strat, the band emerged. But the subject matter remained bleak in songs about an arsonist who had seen his father struck by lightning, a mother killed by a drunk driver, or a parent who survived their offspring (the lovely “A Child Like Grace”).

There was optimism in her new songs, later broken open by romps through “On the Greener Side” and “If Love Was A Train.” Shocked and her mates went from frisky dance steps to a “butt-dance” wiggle on the drum riser – returned en-masse by the obliging crowd.

She virtually shared her life story along the way, including how her mother had checked her into a psychiatric ward (“…until the insurance ran out and I was cured”) and her homelessness, woven as thread of explanation into “5 a.m. in Amsterdam.” Ó Braonáin drawled humorous opening lines to a charged “When I Grow Up” and blew wide-eyed tin whistle on a spritely “Over the Waterfall,” which Hothouse backed on Shocked’s last album.

“The secret to a long life’s knowing when it’s time to go,” Shocked sang in her last song. And she’s primed for new horizons after regaining faith in her talent and her bond with fans – who were treated to autographs after this heart-warming release.