Omawumi sings new songs at Trace Live

The time was 8.30pm and though she was within the Terra Kulture building in Victoria Island, Lagos, the singer initially sang and spoke to her audience via a projected video in the arena. 

"Now I'm tilting toward the direction of what I really really want to do," she said. "I'm convinced you'll like it." It was a mini-documentary and her producer, industry folk and record label heads, most of whom were seated watching themselves, came on screen to speak about her talent. 

The lady finally appeared onstage, supplanting her image. Her live rendition of the song 'Megbele', a tribute to her father, was good but inevitably recalled the propellent power of the studio original.

Stripped of its traditional music elements, the song sounded like a great copy, but a copy nonetheless.

As she said, she is opening up a new path, a move, clearly caused, in part, by a contract with a new record deal and a distribution deal by Roc Nation. But as with most things new, the change might be a little alarming, if only because Omawumi is often thought of as different from her pop colleagues. Where they are frivolous, she's meaningful. Where they are unidirectional, she's eclectic. What might this new direction bring?

It turns out it will yield more of the same multifarious Omawumi and a fresh strain of artistry, as though she seeks to be a Nigerian artist and yet one able to transcend the category's limits. Her Trace Live session combined her earthy personality with a background of her new music. "This is going to be a very intimate affair," she said. Her accomplices included two guitarists, an inspired horn section and, on more than one occasion, a dancer named Bernard.

"Everybody has a story," she said before singing a song from "the point of view of the side-chick". Bernard twirled, stretched, jumped. 

As she gave the story behind each of the songs performed, so did she flash glimpses of her famed realness. At one point, she asked, "Do you like my jacket? This is by Ituen Basi. I go lay am down quietly," easing into the pidgin of Warri, the town she grew up in before becoming a runner-up at a singing competition and from there to the limelight.

At another point, she announced: "This song is a heartbreak song." The song though sounded a little too joyful, evidence that the artist was on the side of the heartbreaker, not the heartbreakee. 

Love, its pleasures and its taboos have long been a major part of Omawumi's music. It formed the most revealing of the backstories on the night. While informing her audience that her partner was seated watching her, Omawumi announced that the next song "was inspired by my husband's ex". Apparently, the 'Bottom Belle' singer was the usurper... until she wasn't.

Here she was being conciliatory towards her vanquished rival. "Let's give her a happy ending," she said. Titled 'Dolapo', a stand-in titular character based on Omawumi herself, the song was less of a happy ending for the ex than it was a veiled triumph tune for the winning intruder. As always, the person telling the story decides who wins. Had the real-life story gone the other way, it was easy to imagine Omawumi writing a soaring aria of love and revenge.

Sounds from the concert, as from the Omawumi catalogue, were diverse: big band, traditional, pop. Omawumi's music is multitudinous.  

"I'm not really a mainstream artist," she told her audience, but she has had to do some songs "because of the extra..." She rubbed a thumb against her fingers in the well-known gesture for money.

Clearly looking to go beyond trending music, Omawumi has named the new album Timeless. To that end, the project pays homage to some of the artists who have attained that status. Two artists she mentioned during the Trace Live session were Fela and Angelique Kidjo.

For the first, she couldn't quite find an appropriate song so she covered what she called "Fela's only love song", 'Ololufe', from his time with the Koola Lobitos band. For the second artist, she gave an account of how much pursuing she had to do to get the Beninese diva on 'Play na Play'. Then she performed the song.

"How many people don buy the album?" Omawumi asked towards the end. And then she yelled in a recognisably Warri style when she deemed the number of hands raised insufficient, adding somewhat solemnly, "I hope I did the right thing with this album."

She would know that no real answers could be given on the night. But the audience at Terra Kulture waited on more songs an hour after she walked onstage. If this wait was a sign that she had done the right thing, Omawumi didn't notice.

"Everybody still sidown dey wait," she said half-mockingly, signalling the end of the show, and then she thundered: "Go buy the album!"

Omawumi's Timeless is available on iTunes