Leave it to Bootsy Collins to turn a global shutdown into a cosmic jam session. While most of the world was still figuring out how to bake bread, the funk legend was at home in Cincinnati, raiding his vault for something to make sense of it all. The result was “Stars,” a cross-generational, cross-cultural explosion of groove and goodwill recorded in isolation but orbiting around one idea: connection.
“When everything shut down, I thought, ‘What can I do now?’” he told me. “The album I was working on wasn’t coming out until later in the year, but this was happening right now. So I went hunting through my tracks, found one that felt right, and said, ‘Okay, this is the moment.’”
The song came together piece by piece, like a space-age patchwork quilt. Bootsy recruited a wild mix of guests—banjo wizard Béla Fleck, philosopher Dr. Cornel West, and a then-teenaged Nashville firebrand named EmiSunshine. “I didn’t want it to be just one singer,” he said. “I wanted a collage of cultures. Something that showed we’re all in this together.”
Recording, of course, was remote. “That was new for me, man,” he laughed. “I’m used to being in the room with people, feeling the funk live. But this time it was emails, phone calls, bouncing files back and forth. It threw me off, but we had to do it that way. You can’t let the groove die because of circumstance.”
“Stars” became a fundraiser for MusiCares, the nonprofit that supports musicians in times of crisis. For Bootsy, it hit close to home. “All my musician friends were losing gigs,” he said. “So what better way to help than through music itself? It just made sense.”
But the song wasn’t just about the pandemic—it was about everything that seemed to be collapsing at once. “It was the disease, the racism, the anger,” he said. “It all felt like one big sickness. And I thought, what are we missing here?”
Then came that classic Bootsy philosophy: “We’re missing the hippie side of things,” he said, his voice equal parts preacher and poet. “The real love and the real peace. I came through a time when it wasn’t overproduced or fake. It just felt good. People loved each other. It was messy, but it was real.”
What surprised him most was hearing that same spirit in EmiSunshine’s voice. “She’s so young, but she’s got that Janis Joplin thing,” he said. “That raw, soulful truth. I never met her in person, but I could feel her vibe. It reminded me of when music was about spirit, not just sound.”
That’s how “Stars” turned from a song into a sermon. “The whole idea,” he said, “is that we’re all on the same mothership. The mothership is the Earth. That’s our ride. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that. We’ve had it so good that we forgot the blessing of just being here.”
Then he leaned in, Bootsy-style, with the kind of metaphor only he could deliver: “Whoever created us says, ‘I’m gonna make something happen that reminds you—you’re all together. If one of you goes overboard, you all go overboard. You all walk the plank together.’”
That’s Bootsy in a nutshell: the philosopher of funk, dishing enlightenment through basslines and glitter. Even when he’s talking about global collapse, he sounds like he’s leading a dance floor revival. “These tragedies, man—they’re supposed to bring us together,” he said. “That’s what this song is about. It’s a reminder that we’re all being held by the same hands.”
As for the title, it’s almost funny that “Stars” didn’t already exist in the Bootsy Collins catalog. “Yeah, right?” he laughed. “You’d think I’d already done one! Stars have been with me forever—from my glasses to my guitar. But I guess I was saving it for the right moment.”
That moment turned out to be one of the strangest in modern history, and yet, somehow, the funkiest man alive found a way to make it shimmer. “I just wanted to do something that made people feel good again,” he said. “You know, remind them that the mothership’s still flying.”
The upcoming album is The Power of the One, but “Stars” remains the real snapshot of the era—Bootsy’s transmission from quarantine space. “The album was about unity, too,” he said, “but ‘Stars’ was the emergency broadcast. That was the call to come together.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
