The Change Your World Tour borrows its title from an Anthony Hamilton song, a retro soul ballad that explains deep feelings in plain language. ("I never knew about true love/It changes your whole world.") It also invokes "Change," written by Warren Campbell for Heather Headley; there, the transformation is more literally soulful. ("I underestimated Your grace/But You loved me in spite of my ways/And changed me.")

Mr. Hamilton and Ms. Headley, who share billing on the tour, are both singers with roots in the gospel church. They're also throwbacks, in a sense: he to the chivalrous soul of the 1970's, and she to the self-affirming R&B of the 1990's. What they have most in common is a belief in music that reflects the substance of real life. So their concert on Wednesday night at the Beacon Theater was an unpretentious heap of disclosures, entreaties and complaints.

All of those things were often entangled in the ballads of Mr. Hamilton, who has the kind of sumptuous yet grainy baritone that can handle soul-baring and sweet-talking alike. He offered three such songs in a row: "Change Your World" and his only recent chart singles, "Can't Let Go" and "Charlene." Each was a portrait of a man struggling to control his emotions, or make sense of them.

At brighter tempos, he was deliciously impish. He danced in the aisles during an ode to plus-size women that complimented someone by telling her she looked "like a plate of neck bones." And that was just after a tune called "Cornbread, Fish & Collard Greens." (Apparently love can be a picnic, sometimes.)

Ms. Headley's voice is a sturdy instrument, with none of the fissures that give Mr. Hamilton his vulnerable air. So the wistfulness of her post-breakup anthem "In My Mind" was girded with steel. And when she shined cold light on a guilty conscience in "I Didn't Mean To," it wasn't her own. ("You're a mother, you're a wife, but you're also a cheater" is an accusation, not a confession.)

Partly as a nod to her Caribbean roots, and partly, perhaps, because it's de rigueur, Ms. Headley breezed through a pair of dancehall tracks with sampled rhymes by Sean Paul and Vybez Kartel. But she was strongest on ballads, which let her flaunt the interpretive skills that earned her a Tony Award; her most rapturous applause was for a medley of hits by Anita Baker, Babyface and Karyn White. On Ms. White's "Superwoman" the women in the audience heartily sang along.

Ms. Headley prefaced "Change" with a declaration of faith, but it was nothing compared to Mr. Hamilton's white-costumed second half. He gave vent to self-righteousness on "Preacher's Daughter," with strident guest vocals by his wife, Tarsha McMillian. Then came "Pass Me Over," which involved an inaudible string section, an extraneous choir and a firm purpose as Mr. Hamilton led what amounted to an altar call.

The directness and devotion of that gesture spoke to an audience that had earlier rejected an opening act, Van Hunt. Like the evening's headliners, Mr. Hunt led a sharp and impressive band. What defeated him was an elaborate sense of artifice. "Where is your character?" he sang at one point, in a Curtis Mayfield falsetto; the crowd might have given him a chance if they thought he could answer that question himself.