Songfacts®:

• "Star," Bryan Ferry's first original song in a decade, closes his sprawling five-disc collection, Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023. It's described as "an anxious, darkly gleaming slab of pounding post-techno."
• The song emerged from a creative partnership with painter and writer Amelia Barratt. Ferry first met Barratt when he lent his studio for her to record an audiobook.
• Ferry and Barratt's collaboration on "Star" began with a musical sketch from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails.
  
  "I've known Trent and Atticus for some time," Ferry told Uncut magazine. "They sent me a few ideas they had for collaborations, and this was one of them. I developed their idea into something that I really liked."
• Barratt contributed the lyrics, which was unusual for Ferry. "It was very interesting for me to work with Amelia's lyrics," he noted. "It's the first time I've ever made new work with someone else's words."
• Placing "Star" at the end of his box set retrospective was a pointed statement that Bryan Ferry's story wasn't over.
  
  "I think it was a very good place to put it," he told Uncut magazine. "That idea came to me in a flash. We had this 80-track box set and I was kind of going, 'Hmm, there's something missing... I just thought, 'Oh, let's add this track as a kind of indicator of what I've been up to, a hint that I've actually been very active over the last couple of years.' Because people just think if they haven't heard from you in a while, you're not doing anything."
• "Star" was followed by further collaborative work between Ferry and Barratt that ultimately blossomed into a full album titled Loose Talk.