We all operate on borrowed time, navigating life’s bends until arriving at its lone certainty: death. It’s not just what we do with the time in between that matters — it’s how we process the unpredictable. It’s how we cope. For Thundercat, his passion — music — also serves as his outlet.

Thundercat’s bond with music comes from an advanced pedigree. The Los Angeles-born bassist’s father played drums for the Temptations and Diana Ross, passing the talent down to Thundercat’s brother, Ronald Bruner Jr. At one point, the two constituted the rhythm section for L.A. thrash outfit Suicidal Tendencies, after Thundercat joined the group as a teenager. He has since worked with fusion legend Stanley Clarke, soul icon Erykah Badu, experimentalist Flying Lotus (the yin to his musical yang) and rap king Kendrick Lamar, to name a few.

The Grammy winner’s last three projects — 2013’s “Apocalypse,” the 2015 EP “The Beyond/Where the Giants Rome” and February’s “Drunk” — are ruminations on isolation and mortality draped over his trademark warm brew of funk, R&B and jazz. They’re influenced, in part, by the 2012 death of friend and fellow musician Austin Peralta, but other episodes from his 32 years factor in. His music is about life, and fans gathered at U Street Music Hall on Sunday night to share a slice of theirs with him.

“Drunk” is about the diversions we choose to escape the pain of reality. Thundercat opened the show with the album’s brief foreword, “Rabbot Ho,” a nod to stumbling into the abyss of intoxication. Self-medication is a common method of escape, and Thundercat has an uncanny ability to make listeners feel that through his music. Songs like “Heartbreaks + Setbacks” and “We’ll Die” speak to trials, tribulations and inevitabilities, yet his knack for unleashing their harnessed emotion through explosions of live, free-form improvisation was remarkable.

There were other welcome tangents, such as dives into “These Walls” and “Complexion,” from Lamar’s ambitious “To Pimp a Butterfly,” and “A Fan’s Mail (Tron Song Suite II),” an ode to Thundercat’s pet feline that ponders the advantages of nine simple lives compared with a single complicated one. Meanwhile, “Them Changes,” the crowd favorite, expertly captured the suspended-animation feel of post-heartbreak existentialism.

“Drunk” details how Thundercat is dealing with life’s stream of changes. He channels his adjustment crisis into art, dissolving his sorrow in the rhythm and disappearing into the music. Sunday’s show was about coping through a healthy outlet — a therapeutic journey fans are more than happy to embark on along with him.