For the past quarter century, the soul and R&B singer Erykah Badu has spent about eight months each year on the road performing.

“It’s what I do, completely,” Badu, 54, told Popcast, The New York Times’ music show, in an interview last month. “And it completes me.”

“I’m from the theater, so I feel very at home — it’s my therapy,” she added. “I’m not wrong in that place, in front of that mic. I am accepted and applauded.”

Yet for an artist of Badu’s range and influence, she has released comparatively little music. Since her three-times platinum debut, “Baduizm,” in 1997, and its beloved 2000 follow-up, “Mama’s Gun,” which helped to define the vaunted neo-soul movement, Badu has released just three more albums over the next 25 years, plus a 2015 phone-themed mixtape and a sprinkling of singles.

Instead, in addition to her near-constant touring, the singer has raised three children, experimented with acting and become a dedicated doula for both birth and death. “But when I have something to say,” Badu said, “I write an album.”

Her latest, “Abi & Alan,” a full-length collaboration with the Alchemist, the hip-hop producer known for his omnivorous sampling, has been teased for months, though the pair has not announced a release date. Fittingly, they have debuted the music primarily onstage as Badu geared up for the “Mama’s Gun” 25th anniversary tour that will take her through the end of the year.

“To me, it’s a sport, the recording business,” Badu said. “I do know when I have something to say, because it means I want to get in the game.”

In a wide-ranging conversation on Popcast, she discussed why her trailblazing career took the shape that it did; her influence on many generations of rappers, including the famous fathers of her children; and her kinship with D’Angelo, who died soon after this interview, at 51.

Below are edited excerpts from the conversation, which can be watched or listened to in full here.

Erykah Badu on a Lifetime of Being ‘Oblivious to Rules’

JOE COSCARELLI You were quite early, I think, in being a soul and R&B singer who fully embraced hip-hop.

ERYKAH BADU I really hate that I get categorized, because I don’t think I do one thing. I certainly don’t think there’s one song that I’ve made that sounds like the other. I’m always in the specific moment of that music, and the drums come first. I love the idea of live instrumentation because I am a jazz artist. I love improvisation. I love to make a song, but I like to see how far we can take it live.

JON CARAMANICA In an old Vibe magazine interview, you were talking about your process of vocalizing and said, “I used to pretend that I was a horn.”

BADU I played the clarinet in elementary school, and it has this really nasally kind of thing. And so does my voice. So I would just always imagine myself as a clarinet. I first was introduced to clarinet from “Popeye,” the sailor cartoons. It had a real Benny Goodman kind of a thing going on there with the score. [Vocalizing] Skibble up de be bop, bop bop and then the horns.

CARAMANICA On “Baduizm” and your early work, you really hear the touch of the hand on the instrument, which was very striking in the mid-90s. When you were looking around at that time, did you even think about commercial ambitions or the broader question of where your album sat amid the glitz and glamour?

BADU Of course I thought about those things. And at the same time, I knew I had something that was not like anything else. I think I didn’t know how quickly it would be understood and picked up. It was just a homemade thing.

COSCARELLI Then all of a sudden it’s reaching millions and not only that, but you immediately find a community of like-minded musicians. D’Angelo was also dealing with the weight of comparison and the weight of history, especially because what you guys were doing at that time was seen as a corrective or a response to the sound and materialism of rap.

BADU I first met D’Angelo’s music. I was working in a coffee shop in Dallas, Texas, called Grinders, and somebody was playing D’Angelo’s new album, “Brown Sugar.” I heard it, and it was just so refreshing to me because I was also working on music and really wanted to meet him.

The next month, I went to South by Southwest. I was passing out my demo and I guess I gave one of them to the right person, who was managing Mobb Deep. And she goes, “I have a friend that I’m gonna hand this to,” and the friend was Kedar [Massenburg, a music executive and producer].

Kedar and I started to talk and then he goes, “Well, I manage D’Angelo.” At that time, I really thought I was on the right path. I didn’t have anyone to kill the dream. I just believed the things I believed and kept them to myself and they just began to happen, one thing after the other.

BADU I opened for D’Angelo through Kedar in Dallas. We’ve been really good friends since then. In fact, when we first met Questlove, we met him the same day. It was 1996 or 1997 at the BET Awards in L.A. The Roots had a show, House of Blues, during that week. Goodie Mob opened for them, maybe the Fugees were the headliner. And D’Angelo and I went together and we both saw Ahmir [Questlove] at the same time and got the same thought: He was a human drum machine. He just kind of had quanticism in his chest. And I was looking over at D’ hoping that he didn’t think the same thing, because we both wanted it for ourselves.

COSCARELLI They had a little bromance and cut you out?

BADU They had a little bromance. It’s fine. But we all kind of got together as a crew when we started working at Electric Lady here in New York, ’99.

We all admired Ahmir so much that he was kind of like the godfather. We each worked on our albums separately. We each executive produced our own albums, but Ahmir’s presence was very important to us — his opinions, his advice. We all worked together and became a little family.

COSCARELLI You were working on “Mama’s Gun,” and D’Angelo was making “Voodoo.” You were on these parallel paths of making follow-ups to huge debuts —

BADU It was the dawning of the digital age, where we were now using laptops and … AOL? Is that right? We were sending music to each other through text message, through AOL.

COSCARELLI Like AOL Instant Messenger? The idea of you and D’Angelo IM-ing each other is a magical image.

BADU Yeah, everybody was in on it, you know? I had said, I’m never getting on this, because I don’t want the government in my business. We were doing that and we just kind of talked about who we were and what we loved and who hurt our feelings.

COSCARELLI You have children with three rappers: the D.O.C., André 3000 and Jay Electronica. You’ve been an artist and had agency in your own work for so long, but do you ever think of your role as muse? So much great hip-hop has been made about you, including Outkast’s “Ms. Jackson.”

BADU I don’t think “Ms. Jackson” was actually about me. I don’t think so, but people say it.

COSCARELLI About your mother, then, more specifically.

BADU Well, she thinks it was about her. She’s got the bumper sticker and the airbrush T-shirt.

COSCARELLI What does the bumper sticker say?

BADU Ms. Jackson! The T-shirt says “Sorry Ms. Jackson.”

COSCARELLI But I can imagine how it might turn your mind upside down to think of yourself not as the artist, but the inspiration.

BADU I think I inspire many things, just the same way I was inspired when I was young. I think the reason I inspire things is because I am just either oblivious to rules or they don’t really sway me. I’m not afraid of it, you know? I can be completely myself.

COSCARELLI And you allowed those men that freedom in their connections with you?

BADU I think what we have in common is that we were all on that path. Any person that I’ve come in contact with — specifically the fathers of my amazing children — I think that they were on that already. That’s why we sympathetically vibrated together.

CARAMANICA What self-doubt did you have on the way to stardom?

BADU I didn’t hear anything on the way to stardom. I started having self-doubt after I was more popular — way after “Baduizm,” way after “Mama’s Gun” — because people have opinions and those opinions, you know, they’re a force.

COSCARELLI You didn’t begin to feel self-doubt until more than a decade into your career?

BADU We didn’t have social media. You don’t get to hear all of those things, you don’t even get to look back at yourself doing stuff. I’m a sensitive being. So I absorb so much. It’s hard not to look at it and read it and think, am I?

COSCARELLI And yet other than your constant touring, one thing that’s kept you fresh for many new generations is your online presence. Do you see social media as a marketing tactic or as a playground for your acting and comedic side?

BADU It’s a playground that happens to also be a marketing tactic. I get on there and have fun. And it just so happens that it keeps me present in the business, as well.

COSCARELLI Does it ever get you in trouble?

BADU Not recently. I’ve learned who the audience is. But yes, it does give me trouble. There’s an Erykah Badu problem.

COSCARELLI How would you describe the Erykah Badu problem?

BADU It’s gonna be weird, but all I talk about is peace and love and forgiveness and kindness and somehow that makes me the center of hate. Because I didn’t know what to say and when, maybe, at a certain point.

COSCARELLI You had a period where you were very interested in having public conversations about radical empathy for people who had been considered cultural villains: Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Louis Farrakhan. And you were speaking openly, and seemingly from the heart, about this idea that hurt people hurt people.

BADU But I quickly learned that people don’t like their hate interrupted. And I knew that wasn’t the right audience for that type of conversation. Unless you want to debate. Or to be hated.

COSCARELLI How has your thinking on that subject changed or evolved now that a cultural and political shift has happened against the idea of “woke,” which you had a role in popularizing as a concept?

BADU People have become more and more and more angry and opinionated and offended. My friend James calls them the offendocracy. People who are waiting to jump out the bushes: Ha! Caught you saying this or that.

BADU On all sides. I don’t feel strongly about anything that would lead me to damaging the gift that I’ve been given.

BADU Yeah. Not on social media — that’s not the place. But there are places that I can make a difference, and I do.

CARAMANICA Do you think, in the abstract, we as a society are not empathetic enough?

BADU I think everybody is as empathetic as they should be. It’s not a race. Everybody doesn’t have to have the same amount of empathy at the same time. And if it’s true empathy, that means you’ve learned something. So I don’t think everyone should have to be measured by the same rule. I know my audience: trees, birds, wind, rain. And I feel very comfortable and happy speaking my words and my truth in that direction.