When Ani DiFranco first started touring, her steadily growing audiences wanted something to take home, and they had two options: purchase a cassette tape from the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, or bring a tape recorder to the show.

The venues are a little bigger these days, and the albums are a little easier to find, but when it came to releasing an open-ended series of live records, the Little Folksinger is doing it the old-fashioned way. The initial wave of discs will be the first-ever solo Ani live albums. They won't be available in stores - only here at righteousbabe.com and at Ani's shows. A new performance will be released every six weeks or so, each of them hand-picked by Ani herself.

While these albums are being released in a time-honored tradition, the recordings themselves are anything but old hat. Each show was recorded onto 16-track ProTools software, isolating each signal for optimum clarity, including a separate microphone for the audience. This state-of-the-art "studio on wheels" captures the integrity of Ani's performance, from the chunkiest guitar chord to the faintest poetic whisper. Needless to say, this bootleg will not feature the coughs and conversations of the people who sat next to you.

Thanks to those early fans, Ani's tapes were circulated, dubbed, borrowed and worn out, allowing her to be a full-time singer/songwriter. These records were created in the spirit of that time, and they exist for one reason: Ani's still on her own, but when she steps onto that stage, she's never alone.