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Jennifer Knapp hit the stage for the first time in four and a half years Thursday night, appearing to a sold-out crowd in the tiny Hotel Café venue in the heart of Hollywood, in what has been billed as her "comeback concert."

Jennifer Knapp

Knapp, looking much the same as when we last saw her (maybe with a few new tattoos?), took the stage after friend and fellow CCM veteran Phillip LaRue played a handful of songs as an opener.

Once on stage, alone with an acoustic guitar, Knapp said, "They say it's like riding a bike. We shall see … " Then—to great applause—she launched into one of her biggest hits, "A Little More," from her Grammy-nominated album Lay it Down (2000). After the huge applause for that first song died down, someone in the audience shouted out, "How's the bike treating you?" to which Knapp replied, "It's a 21 speed and I'm about ready for a tricycle."

For the remainder of her 9-song set, Knapp played all new songs, many of which she said she "wrote last week."

"You guys have had about seven years of listening to the same boring three records," said Knapp early in the show, seemingly to justify the absence of most of her older hit songs from the set list. But despite most of the music being totally new to everyone in the room, the audience of devoted fans (some had flown to L.A. just for the concert) was thoroughly rapt the whole time.

A week ago, Knapp had broken her long public silence with a statement on her website, saying that she had been "traveling mostly" during her time away from music. She wrote: "My experiences have been both wildly exotic and extraordinarily mundane. But mostly I will say that I have had a chance to get my feet under me. I took that time to discover more about myself and my own faith without the veil of expectations to a cause. Without writing a novel at this point, I'll just say that I'm starting to think that I might actually be a songwriter, musician, or artist of some kind … So, maybe I should do something about it?

"I know that many of you have persisted at hope that I would return to music. Why you have wanted or even cared has been one of the greatest mysteries to me, at the same time, a complete and utter blessing as it has always been. Thank you for your support. I can only hope to repay you with what you have waited for … music."

That "repayment" began in earnest Thursday night in Hollywood. Her set's second song, "Letting Go," can be heard on her recently revived MySpace page, but the other songs she played—many of them quite beautiful—are presumably fresh creations that may not have been recorded yet.

Knapp at Smoakstack Studios in Nashville, from her MySpace page

However, Knapp's MySpace page includes pictures of her apparently recording tracks with producer Paul Moak at Nashville's Smoakstack Studios. Moak has worked with the likes of Mat Kearney, Martha Wainwright, Toby Mac, Hilary Duff, Leeland, Michael W. Smith, and Amy Grant.

Before her fifth song on Thursday night, Knapp spoke about growing up in Kansas listening to country music—Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers. She said her family had been begging her to write country songs for years, and that she wrote this song in particular for her grandfather.

Knapp wasn't particularly talkative between songs, apart from a few comments while tuning her guitar ("I usually do this in private" and later "good grief, I tune a guitar like a girl!"). At one point in the show, however, an audience member shouted out something like "How have you been?" to which Knapp said "If you think you're going to find out some big secret, keep fishin! I didn't ask you what you did with your vacation!"

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