NYC-based songwriter/producer Raia Was on seeing some life-changing Erykah Badu performances.  Raia Was: The best gig I ever saw is the collection of Erykah Badu shows I’ve gone to since age 17. My first show of hers was part of The Sugar Water Festival in 2005 (full disclosure: this whole article has required a lot of googling to remember the years/locations!) and though I barely knew her music, I was hypnotized by her as a performer. Really, she’s a performance artist, slipping between stations at the theremin and sampler and cups of tea. The way she spins the room. I saw this and thought, “How do I do that?” I saw her next in New Orleans at Voodoo Fest in 2008. I was a student then and the rumor amongst the crowd was that her drummer got delayed or couldn’t show up for some reason and there was a young local drummer on the festival crew who she looked at and said, “Do you know all my songs?” And thus he lived out every young musician’s dream of being pulled on stage with their own musical hero to save the day. She was also very pregnant. I don’t think I had ever seen before or since, an artist perform pregnant. And her pregnancy wasn’t at all what the show was about. I remember thinking, “This is a person, inside her life, doing her job as an artist and also living all at once.” It was while I was still in New Orleans that New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) came out, the first time she dropped an album amidst my active fandom. I devoured it and also couldn’t imagine how she’d perform it live. It was so sonically different, such an exciting departure from her previous records. I needed to know what that show would look like. I went to her 2011 show at Palladium (then called Best Buy Theater or Nokia Theater or PlayStation Theater — my god what utter nonsense these companies make of NYC). It was a medley kind of set, a mix of songs from all her records. I liked it, but it didn’t really make a mark on me until the end of the show when she broke script. We were coming up on New Year’s Eve and as we all pondered our resolutions, she wanted to impart some advice to us with an addendum to one of her lyrics. She said, “Stay out your mind… ’cause that’s where all the time traveling happens.” She said it slowly, she looked right at me. Of course, it’s been said before — worry, anticipation, anxiety keeps us perpetually in the future and out of the present. But the honesty of her connection to the audience makes a moment like that near life-changing. Perhaps indeed, life-changing. And what is that? How does an artist play so well in the surf between the crowd and the work, how does she so thoroughly put on a show and also let her guard down? And she does it differently every time. When I think back on her shows it’s that breadth of change, that she is always doing it differently, that has most inspired me and made me brave in my own approach to performance. And perhaps no show has had the most lasting effect on me as a performer as seeing her play New Amerykah Part One with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 2013. My brain was practically on fire finally hearing this album live, but even more so, hearing a complete departure from the original production, swapped for an orchestra. The show’s success was an ode to her work, to its enduring creativity and its fertility as source material for performance, no matter the mode. I could feel how special that night was for her personally. She bashfully accepted our insistence on an unplanned encore by straight-up just playing “Soldier” all over again. And at the end she gestured toward her mother in the crowd, reminding us all to do our work, to take our encores, and thank our mothers. ❖ Raia Was’ Captain Obvious (Piano Version) EP is out now.   The post Raia Was is Badu for Good appeared first on LA Weekly.