Maya Rudolph was in an airport when she first heard the dismal news, back in April, of Prince’s death. Her good friend Gretchen Lieberum was on her way to rehearsal for the band they share — a tribute to their beloved Prince, which they call Princess.

“It was unbelievably shocking, strange, and sad,” recalls Lieberum. “It definitely took a little time to figure out what we should do, or wanted to do.”

Coincidentally, they were scheduled to perform as Princess just a couple of nights later at the Moontower Comedy Festival in Austin, Texas. They thought about canceling.

“For me, it felt a little ooky,” admits Rudolph, the former “Saturday Night Live” cast member who starred in “Bridesmaids” and on the recent sketch show “Maya & Marty,” with Martin Short. “I didn’t want to be responsible for any sort of public grieving. I didn’t feel it was our place.”

But Lieberum talked her into it.

“I empathized with her,” she says, “but I also felt a strong sense that it would be an important show for us, and them” — the audience. “I’m glad we did it. People were laughing and crying. It was a seated venue, and nobody sat the entire time. It was a moving experience.”

Now they’re set to share their mutual attraction to Prince’s outrageously funky music with a few more audiences, on an East Coast mini-tour that begins at the Paradise on Wednesday.

Best friends since they attended the University of California-Santa Cruz together more than 20 years ago, the two “share the same singing brain,” as Rudolph explains. “We’re both serial harmonizers. We sort of sing as one voice, but we each take a part.”

They’re so close, in fact, that Lieberum claims responsibility for Rudolph becoming a mother for the first time. She was pregnant, and she suggested Rudolph have a baby, too.

Now Rudolph has four kids, with the film director Paul Thomas Anderson. Lieberum hit the pause button at two.

“She owes me two,” jokes Rudolph. “She’s tardy.”

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“Tardy to the party,” Lieberum adds. (They tend to finish each other’s thoughts.)

It’s been a rough year, idol-wise. When she was a young girl, Rudolph says, if you’d asked her who she was going to marry, she would have said Prince and Gene Wilder, the comic actor who died in August.

“Wow,” says Lieberum, sharing the phone line from Los Angeles. “Quite a combo.”

Rudolph, who’s never less than fully committed as a comedian, actually sounds a little subdued.

“I feel incredibly, um, empty, to be honest,” she says. “We’ve lost heroes this year that meant so much to me. The excitement of knowing that Prince was around — that there was more musically coming, that you could see him sing and play anything — was so motivating to Gretchen and myself for so many years.

“This magic is truly gone. Thank God he was so prolific, and there’s so much to choose from that we can listen to the rest of our lives. Hopefully one day the vault will open, and we’ll be showered with more.”

Their Prince worship had its coming-out party four years ago, when the two performers sang the artist’s raunchy “Darling Nikki” on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” backed by house band the Roots. The week after Prince’s death, they returned to Fallon’s “The Tonight Show,” singing the somber “Sometimes It Snows in April” with D’Angelo.

They met Prince once at one of his gigs in Anaheim, and he pronounced himself a fan of their cover band. By now, they have an extensive repertoire, from greatest hits like “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Delirious,” and “Little Red Corvette” to unreleased rarities such as “Purple Music.”

“He gave something to all of us that’s beyond our imagination,” Rudolph says. “There really wasn’t anyone who came close to him, what he did, the way his mind worked.”

One of Rudolph’s comic fortes is her uncanny ability to capture the singing tics of a wide range of superstars, from Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj to Gwen Stefani, whose band, No Doubt, once played in Santa Cruz – with Rudolph and Lieberum’s funk band, Supersauce, opening.

Rudolph calls herself a “parrot.” Asked whether her mother, the late songwriter and soul-jazz singer Minnie Riperton, had the same knack for mimicry, she says she doesn’t know.

“I was 7 when she died,” at age 31, of cancer, Rudolph says. “I certainly don’t have that recollection, but I wouldn’t be surprised. She was so vocally skilled. My dad said my mom was always really funny, that she probably would’ve gone into comedy if it weren’t for music.”

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Lieberum, when she’s not performing with her bestie, maintains her own recording career as a kind of contemporary torch singer. With her musical partner Jake Blanton, a multi-instrumentalist who has recorded with Beck and the Killers’ Brandon Flowers, among others, she has a new project called Sargent. They’ve just released new music.

“Gretchen has always had her own sound,” says Rudolph. “Her songwriting has gotten more and more beautiful, and her vocal quality is incredible — it kind of has its own melancholic beauty.

“I’m staring at her,” she adds.

Now that they’ve decided they’re comfortable carrying on as Princess in the absence of their muse, they expect to continue beyond the upcoming shows.

“We’ve always kind of played it by ear, with Maya, especially, being so busy,” Lieberum says. “It comes from a place of love and fun. It was before, and it still is.”

In fact, she says, she fully expects to keep singing Prince songs with her friend well into old age: “We’ll be nerding out forever, in the nursing home, annoying everyone.”