When I last caught up with local singer, songwriter and performer Zaki Ibrahim in this column, it was March of 2006 and the buzz around her had begun. She’d just had the eye-­opening experience of performing for the notoriously tough crowd at NYC’s Apollo Theatre and was garnering increasingly large audiences here on home turf. Her first releases — the songs “Grow” and “Daylight” — were making the rounds courtesy of Nick Holder’s Treehouse label, and a demo EP was about to be launched. Ibrahim was exuberant and extroverted, punctuating her stories with guffaws and off-the-cuff comments.

Two years and a whole lot of accolades later, Ibrahim is, at first, a bit more reserved in what she says. Clearly, as she’s doing much of her growing in an ever-brighter public spotlight, the vocalist is slightly more considered.

“My goal is to remain creative and not necessarily be affected by public exposure,” she tells me from her Parkdale digs. “Right now, I feel like I’m going through this stage of trying to clear that creative path. I’m paying attention to where my energy is being spent, trying to move towards the goal of remaining creative and not expending energy on things like ‘How is this going to look?’

“That is a part of the creativity — you want to think about how you’re presented — but the main thing is keeping the creative channels open. It’s energy management in a way.”

It’s not only the media attention that has Ibrahim thinking about how she presents herself, it’s also the fact that she and her Iqra Music label signed a deal with Red Ink — a subsidiary of Sony/BMG Canada — last fall. Inevitably, signing with a major as a young artist entails more compromises than one might care to cuddle up to.

“Actually, it feels cool,” says Ibrahim. “It’s taken a good year-plus to work on building what the right relationships are going to be and the thing that’s going to fit for myself and the team I had around me already, but there’s a good team coming from the Red Ink side — people who are passionate about properly presenting and representing the music and who I am. I just think it will be a constant work in progress to make sure that the balance is there.”

Ibrahim is certainly getting to check the waters as Red Ink prepares to release her official debut, the seven-track Eclectica (Episodes In Purple), next week. The EP — produced primarily by Chin Injeti with one song produced by Holder and another remixed by King Britt — does the songstress, and the crew that surround her, proud.

The arrangements are rich, with hip-hop, soul, R&B, rock and folk elements all woven throughout. “Grow” has been reworked to become the even more mature and infectious “Grow Again,” and Ibrahim’s lyrical mix of social commentary and romantic reflections is fully intact. In fact, with an EP of seven songs sounding this good, it’s a bit surprising that there’s no date set for the release of a full album as of yet.

“I could put something out now, but I feel like it’s still in development. It would need heavy incubators and wouldn’t be the most natural birth,” laughs Ibrahim.

While she gives herself the time and space to continue writing and recording, Ibrahim has been focused on her live show. Just last week, she had three important dates, performing at Joe’s Pub in New York, the impressive Black Lilly festival in Philly and opening for Erykah Badu at Toronto’s Massey Hall. Tuesday’s release party finds Ibrahim surrounded by her DistrictSix family, including DJ Nana, opener Kamau and DJ L’Oqenz who holds down the decks and samples in Zaki’s live band.

I wonder, after all of these experiences, if Ibrahim senses that audiences are in sync with her, regardless of their size.

“I have felt this nervousness,” she admits. “Like, ‘What if I look out one day and there’s just this sea of faces? How do I connect musically, lyrically and as the person that I am with all of these people that I don’t know?’

“But it’s actually not much different from connecting in a room with 12 people. The nature of the music is fairly intimate, and every show is like its own experience with a group of people, taking in their reactions or” — she laughs modestly — “the lack thereof.”