Sly Stone and his lady companion, who I learn is named Shay, disembark from the chopper and walk toward the shop. He applies pink baby lotion to his hands, which I notice are huge, with elongated, tapering fingers. He's still very slim—there was never a Fat Sly period—and he does not appear frail, as several recent reports have described him. In fact, he moves rather well, especially for a 64-year-old man who's just spent time scrunched into a custom-chopper cockpit. But he has the same hunched posture he had at the '06 Grammys—a bit like Silvio Dante's in The Sopranos—and he wears a neck brace.

We shake hands and say hello. I've heard he owns an old Studebaker, so I tell him I, too, own an old Studebaker. "Really, what year?" he says, looking up at me with a smile. He pulls two chairs together for our chat, a metal stool and an old barber's chair. As all these mundane things are transpiring, I realize I'm recording them in my mind like a doctor observing a patient recovering from brain trauma. He is aware of his surroundings. He is capable of participating in linear conversational exchanges. He is able to move chairs.

The only strange part: he is still wearing his helmet and shades when we sit down to talk. Good lord, I'm thinking, is he going to wear the helmet the whole time? Fortunately, without my prompting, Vet says, "Why don't you take your helmet off?," and Sly obliges, revealing a backward San Francisco Giants cap.

"Still sporting the blond Mohawk under there?" I ask.

"Naw, not now, it's very short," he says. Then, deadpan: "Most of it growing under the skin."

I start the interview in earnest with the most obvious question: "Why have you chosen to come back now?"

At this, he grins. "'Cause it's kind of boring at home sometimes."

"But it's bigger than just being bored at home, isn't it?"

"Yeah, I got a lot of songs I want to record and put out, so I'm gonna try 'em out on the road," he says. "That's the way it's always worked the best: Let's try it out and see how the people feel."

Stone tells me he has a huge backlog of new material, "a library, like, a hundred and some songs, or maybe 200." This subject, I come to understand, animates him like no other. With the old songs, he seems uninterested in analysis. When I ask him if he was consciously trying to do something different with his December 1969 single "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," which, with its chanted unison vocals and slap bass, effectively invented 1970s funk—without it, no Parliament-Funkadelic, no Ohio Players, no Earth, Wind & Fire—he replies simply, "Well, the title was spelled phonetically. That was one thing different."

Likewise, on more personal matters, such as what else he was up to in his awol years, he's evasive: "Just traveling—going around, jumping in and out, and up and down." He doesn't flinch when I broach the subject of his hunched posture and neck brace, but it's clear he doesn't want to break out the M.R.I.'s, either. "I fell off a cliff," he says. "I was walking in my yard in Beverly Hills, missed my footing, and started doing flips. But you know what? I had a plate of food in my hand. And when I landed, I still had a plate of food in my hand. That's the God-lovin' truth. I did not drop a bean."

But when I ask Stone to describe the new songs, he straightens up, rocks forward in his seat, and starts rhyming in an insistent cadence somewhere between a preacher's and a rapper's, the rasp suddenly gone from his otherwise low, throaty speaking voice. "There's one that says, 'Ever get a chance to put your thanks on? / Somebody you know you can bank on? / Even sometimes you might embarrass them by pulling rank on? / Now, whatcha gonna do when you run out of them? … Another holiday, you're drunk and curbing it / You can't face a noun, so you're straight adverbing it / You had an argument at home, and you had to have the last word in it / Now whatcha gonna do when you run out of them?'