This has had definite upsides. Starlite controls his recordings and collects all revenue. But there are downsides, too. If he’d had the resources that a label could have provided, if his songs were on the radio and in soda ads, if his music video budgets were three or five times what they were, could he have been as big as his idols?

“How many shows have I played since 2011?” Starlite asked, ruefully. “How many videos have I made? A few, but not nearly as many as I would have wanted. What pains me is that people wanted to help me. They wanted to take me in. And as soon as it was at the door, I ran away — again and again and again.”

His most enduring collaborations have been with other artists, including Bon Iver, Blanco and West, with whom Starlite has grown especially close in recent years. The two first met in 2007, while Starlite was working as a runner at the SoHo restaurant Blue Ribbon Brasserie (he used the office computer to burn a CD of his demo), but they didn’t become friendly until 2016, when both worked on the Chance the Rapper song “All We Got.”

They connected over a digital vocal production technique Starlite had discovered called the harmonizer (or “prismizer”), in which the notes on a keyboard are used to create a real-time, five-part harmony with the singer’s voice. (He later showed it to Bon Iver and Frank Ocean.) Soon after, an invitation to West’s ranch in Wyoming arrived. Starlite lived there on and off in 2018 and 2019, helping West, whose every interview he can quote on command, to craft the albums “Ye” and “Jesus Is King.”

“We just started working immediately,” Starlite said. “I couldn’t believe it. He was validating everything I’d ever thought about myself.”