Nile Rodgers hasn’t stopped moving in years. The Chic cofounder and writer and producer of countless hits since the ‘70s—often the biggest hits of his collaborators’ careers—says his recent lifetime achievement award at February’s Grammys briefly gave him pause and wasn’t something he’d previously considered.

“Whenever I hear about things like that, it always seems to be at the end of a person’s career. I don’t feel like I’m at the end of my career, even a little bit,” Rodgers says in a video call from the library of his Westport, Conn. recording studio, surrounded by countless platinum and gold records. “I’m like ‘Dude. You know how many records I got coming out this year that I’ve already played on, already co-composed?’”

The guitarist and inductee in the Rock & Roll and Songwriters halls of fame, who’s battled addiction earlier in his career and has more recently overcome two bouts of cancer, is credited with so many hits. A partial list: “Everybody Dance,” “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” Duran Duran’s “Notorious,” The B-52s’ “Roam,” Diana Ross’ “Upside Down” and Beyonce’s “Cuff It.”

More recently he’s worked with Coldplay, St. Vincent, has a “very big theatrical project” on the way (he can’t speak about it yet), and performs on the title track to K-pop group Le Sserafim’s debut album, Unforgiven. While explaining how he’s nowhere close to finished, Rodgers, 70, says that more K-pop collaborations with popular groups are on the way.

“After doing two K-pop records, then I jump on a plane, go to Venice, do a concert, then jump on a plane, write two new songs with Duran Duran,” he says. “Then we went from there to Vegas, and then from Vegas … back to Los Angeles, finished up a record, and then last night, I was with Pharrell [Williams; also a collaborator on “Get Lucky”] down in Washington, D.C. I just got home only a few hours ago.”

Rodgers says his most recent prodigious run of work began last year when he worked on a Daddy Yankee record. He moved to Miami, and when his neighbors found out who’d moved in, they let their friends know, and he was deluged with project offers. That gave him lots of choices, so he’s been hopping from one to the next ever since. Once his work is done, he doesn’t give it any thought until someone tells him it’s out.

“I go from one project to the next with full love and full focus, and then I go to the next one. I don’t think about the last one,” he says.

Nile Rodgers says that 95 percent of the music he works on comes about not through proposals from record labels but through relationships. Take Le Sserafim, his first K-pop collaboration. He was already friends with Big Hit Music founder Bang Si-hyuk, better known as Chairman Bang, who himself is a musician and producer (who wrote several songs for his group BTS). Rodgers loved his underdog story. Later on, Bang introduced him to Le Sserafim and asked for his help on “Unforgiven.” He wrote his guitar part after being played the song over Zoom.

“So they put up the track, and I just sort of freestyled over it,” he says.

Did the quintet know just who they were working with?

“Yeah, I mean, come on. They’re artists,” he says. “If they don’t know right away, somebody in their camp says, ‘No, that’s the dude who did ‘Freak Out!’ When we met, they knew exactly what I did. … And of course, now, because of Beyonce’s “Cuff It” now being her most successful charting record, there’s a lot of talk. Now, the Koreans are really into dancing, so that’s another thing. It’s just all these vibes came together.”

Rodgers says he’s keenly paying attention to K-pop, as well as J-rock (and the genre’s talented guitarists like Miyavi). So working with Le Sserafim became a gateway experience for him. He says he’s already recorded another “very important project” that’s “pretty hot” and will be back in Asia to work on more at the end of the year.

While he’s getting to know some younger artists, there are others who are more like family than collaborators—like Duran Duran. Rodgers and Duran Duran met when both were opening for Blondie and David Johansen of New York Dolls (this would have been around 1978), and Rodgers has toured nearly exclusively with them since DD’s resurgence in the aughts.

“The first time we met, it was really love at first sight,” Rodgers says. “If you talk to any of the guys, but especially John Taylor and Andy [Taylor], we … were running around the stadium just laughing and joking like we were little children. I don’t know why we were so giddy, and why we’re having so much fun. But that’s been the glue that’s held our relationship together. … We love each other like brothers. I’ve been through the ups and the downs.”

He says Duran Duran and he just finished a new record; and one of his stipulations is that he wouldn’t play on it unless Andy Taylor, who’s battling Stage 4 prostate cancer, was also able to play.

“He’s having a very tough go of it,” Rodgers says. “I called him up, and I said, ‘Hey, man, here’s the part. This is what it is. I know you can knock this out.’ … It’s that relationship where you believe in one another. As soon as I called Andy, he got it right away. He was like, ‘OK, I’m gonna do it.’”

The man credited with so many hits for other artists also has his own list of dream collaborations, which currently includes Thundercat and Herbie Hancock. He wants to make an instrumental album with the two of them and some of the many great drummers he knows—”something where we’re really just playing.”

He says how he’s shared the stage with Thundercat before and it felt magical, while he and Hancock both worked on Mick Jagger’s 1985 debut solo album, She’s the Boss. Rodgers—who was a jazz lover before finding success with disco, funk, pop and rock—refuses to pick favorites with one exception: His favorite album of all time is John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

“[It’s] because of where I was spiritually and musically at that time in my life,” he says. “That’s the only thing that I could say was an event that came into my life, and it was a superlative event. It sort of made everything else almost irrelevant.”

Here, Rodgers uses his jazz background to explain his interest in K-pop.

“The new K-pop composers are not afraid of interesting harmonic development in their songs,” he says. “They’re still very poppy, but it’s not just a typical four-chord thing that we’ve been listening to for the last 10 years. I’m going, ‘Wow! This is really interesting. I wonder how this is happening?’ That’s what’s attracting me to it: hearing compositions that are harmonically more developed and more interesting because I have a jazz background.”

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Nile Rodgers didn’t start decorating his studio with his records until about a decade ago. He considered the idea corny, even after visiting the homes of Michael Jackson, Michael Bolton or Quincy Jones.

“’Thriller’ was the biggest thing ever. I got it,” he says, laughing. But as he was dealing with cancer, one artist who came over said he should do it to remind everyone who visits of his dedication to his craft. So he hung one up, then another. He found the first gold record he’d ever earned, and remembered how proud he felt walking down the street with it under his arm. That one went up, too. Next thing he knew, he sent assistants to look for all of them in storage. He points over his shoulder.

“That’s like the very beginning of Chic right there, and that’s all the singles,” he begins. “And then it goes all the way around the room, over there to that wall, and what you’re not seeing, because we’re on a second floor … is the stairwell, so the whole stairwell is lined with records and all of the walls are lined with records.”

Presumably, there’s one for “Cuff It” somewhere nearby. Rodgers famously accepted the Grammy for Best R&B Song while Beyonce was late to the ceremony, stuck in L.A. traffic. He spoke about working on the hit, but had none of the words prepared; he didn’t even know Beyonce was absent. His manager pushed him out of his chair, and he just wanted to avoid an awkward moment (during which Beyonce became tied for most-ever Grammys by any artist) and to provide some comedic relief.

That came a day after he was presented his lifetime achievement award by the Recording Academy, for which he’s thankful, despite not being anywhere close to done and, calling the vast majority of songs he’s worked on over the years as “flops.”

“For the Grammys to reward you for your lifetime of doing what you love, of doing the work that’s made you, that’s brought you to your knees, work that’s given you the most joyous times of your life, the best relationships of your life, the greatest highs and the lowest lows… because that’s really what it’s all about,” he says. “It may seem to the public like it’s all just for hits. No, it’s all for the flops.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.