Sometimes it’s seemed Ani DiFranco wants to be a rapper. She’s had a way of turning her words into bullets, delivering them with a rat-a-tat attack that’s punched holes both in the topics she’s aimed at and in her own performances. Her delivery has been serviceable in her spoken passages, but it’s robbed her singing of melody and undermined some of her best writing by cracking her ideas into fragments.

Given the power of her voice and her ability to play it for edge or for beauty, you had to wonder why she didn’t address that flaw. Perhaps she felt she had to sound tough, even if she didn’t sound particularly good. After all, she stormed into the music scene as a feminist/activist lone wolf with a guitar and no record deal. And if she was going to make it in a business where plenty of talented people fall by the wayside, then, damn it, maybe she needed to wrap her art in brass knuckles.

Now that DiFranco’s a commercial success, with her own record label and organization, it seems she’s been slipping the brass knuckles off finger by finger over the past few years. Her new concert album, So Much Shouting/So Much Laughter (Righteous Babe), finds the folk-rocker at the peak of her artistry, still politically and mentally charged, yet ready at last to let her ideas be carried by melodies and arrangements more subtle and sparkling than strident. It’s a striking improvement over her previous live set, 1997’s Living in Clip, in which abrupt, harsh vocal performances at times made her as annoying as a yapping terrier.

Early in the new two-disc set she raps again, letting those bullets fly from her throat with pinpoint accuracy on "Letter to a John." She flows through the tune’s lengthy narrative — a flight through the nightmarish interior world of a hooker — with poetic grace, balancing the harsh jabs of her character’s victimization with passages of smooth, part-sung sympathy. Later, on disc two’s "Self Evident," the fervor in her voice matches that of dirty South preaching, albeit with less raunchy intent. The number’s a call to intellectual arms that evokes the September 11 attacks and disses the war that our corrupt presidential administration and its corporate owners are selling us. "I’m a poem heating hyper-distillation/And I’ve got no room for a lie so verbose," she chants, revving up a silken tirade worthy of old master KRS-One. "Yes, I’m looking out over my whole human family/And I’m raising a toast/Here’s to our last drink of fossil fuels."

So if DiFranco did want to be a real rapper, she’s finally made it. But she’s also become a more precise and skillful singer. Immediately after "Letter to a John," she sails into "Grey," shaping her voice for this lost soul’s story into soft, round tones and flexing its wistful chorus with shades of delicate vibrato. This song’s lyrics have always been among her most sensitive, but the beauty of her voice elevates them further, as does the bright, angular piano of Julie Wolf.

Her evolution as a player and bandleader is also well documented on So Much Shouting/So Much Laughter. Not only in the arrangements, which embrace horns, keyboards, and improvisation as essential parts of her sound, but in her own guitar. At the set’s beginning, when her six-string barks in a too-sharp tone at the start of "Swandive," she jokes, "I don’t know why the fuck I play acoustic guitars. I hate that acoustic-guitar sound." And yet she makes the most of it throughout these 24 performances. DiFranco is far from a virtuoso, but she employs the tricks of a highly skilled strummer, dampening strings with her palm to add power to chords and darken her tone, striking hard or soft to accent her lyric intentions, snapping strings outward to brighten the attack of their notes.

The continuing shifts in her guitar’s dynamics add to the conversational feel of these performances — which is one of their best qualities. The net result of all of these improvements is that So Much Shouting/So Much Laughter is DiFranco’s best album. She’s achieved so much in the company of sympathetic musicians that it will be interesting to hear just how she plays these songs when her next tour brings her to Avalon on November 22. She’ll be playing solo, as she did in her lone-wolf days, when she had so much more to prove.

Ani DiFranco plays a solo show at Avalon on Friday November 22. Call (617) 423-NEXT.