Erykah Badu celebrates her individuality

She didn't take the stage so much as gradually drift into view, her easy, unhurried gait as nonchalant as Sunday mornings and cigarette breaks.

And Erykah Badu gives voice to her songs in much the same fashion: like a kettle set to boil, heated by her inflamed libido, they slowly come to life, and then before you know it, they're bubbling and steaming with so much scalding emotion.

But at first, Badu simmers with stillness.

At The Pearl on Thursday night, she opened her set with the spare "20 Feet Tall," her eyes playing hide and seek in the shadows beneath the brim of a black fedora, purring her words with a kind of sultry languor as her large backing band eased themselves into the song the way that you handle something fragile: with steady hands and a deliberate pace.

But then, three numbers in, Badu was hiking up her dress and dropping her derriere down to the floor, eye wide, mouth wider.

"Told you we ain't dead yet," she boomed on "The Healer (Hip Hop)," her band working up some percussive thunder in a burst of bare-knuckle funk.

Badu's voice can be a warm and sunny day or a dark and stormy night, and like the weather, it's prone to sudden, dramatic shifts.

She can make a death threat sound like a come-on and a come-on sound like a death threat. She's the inverse of most contemporary singers in that understatement is one of her defining traits: Badu seldom overpowers her tunes despite her commanding vocal range, which she unleashes judiciously, and always in service of the song.

She's a mercurial presence, full of contractions, and she knows it.

"Everything around you see, the Ankhs, the wraps, the plus degrees, and, yes, even the mysteries, it's all me," she sang during "Me," a silky-sounding love letter to her own idiosyncrasies, which very much color the tone of her live shows.

Onstage, Badu takes her time with whatever selections from her deep, impulsive repertoire that she chooses to explore on a given night, stretching some songs, such as the smoldering "Out My Mind, Just In Time," into extended, multipart jams or turning an early hit like "On and On" into a jazzy, loose-limbed meditation on life and loss.

In a way, Badu's a throwback to the heady days of '70s R&B, where the personal and the political often inhabited the very same song.

In one breath, Badu will sermonize about saving the world and name check Louis Farrakhan, in the next, she'll vamp about sleeping with her beau's friends.

It all forms a colorful portrait of an equally colorful lady who flaunts her flaws for what they are: a testament to her own individuality.

"Guess I was born to make mistakes, but I ain't scared to take the weight," she sang on "Didn't Cha Know." "So when I stumble off the path, I know my heart will guide me back."

And so even when she's in the wrong, Badu knows it's her right.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.