Variety caught up with Badu over the phone from her Dallas home earlier this week, and filled in a few gaps during a Zoom conference with journalists Thursday afternoon. Badu is keeping mum on what’s in store for Sunday night. The shows - which combined drew over 100,000 viewers, her rep says - are interactive, in that for the first, the audience voted on which setlist they wanted Badu and her musicians to play, and for the second (dubbed “Apocalypse Two: The Rooms”), they voted on which of the differently decorated rooms the group would perform in during the show.

The at-home vibe extends to the performances - sometimes Badu sings while sitting on her bed, at one point she said she had to take a bathroom break - but there are plenty of memorable musical moments.

( More info is available on her website.) She charged $1 for the first, $2 for the second and will charge $3 for the third. The series began with a three-hour concert dubbed “Apocalypse One” on March 23, continued with a special show commemorating the tenth anniversary of her “New Amerykah Part II” album on April 5, and will air a third on Sunday. Within ten days after her tour was postponed, she’d hired a “back-end” livestream company and a paywall service figured out how to broadcast from her home gathered musicians, engineers and technicians, and beamed out to the world. Launched late last month, what makes Badu’s series unusual in a business sense is she’s essentially built her own livestream company, charging viewers a minimal $1-$3 fee, rather than using Instagram Live or YouTube or other conventional avenues. UPDATED: Amid the many ways artists are finding to cope with the coronavirus-imposed shutdown of the live-entertainment industry, it’s safe to say that Erykah Badu has found one of the more innovative solutions with her elaborate “Quarantine Concert Series,” which is streamed live from her home in Dallas.

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