If you don’t ask, then you don’t get. So when Stephen Bruner, better known as Thundercat, wanted a couple of special voices for his new album, he asked. And both Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald said yes.

Just about everyone does a double take when they first see those names, but there they are—Loggins, of “Footloose” fame, and McDonald, the former Doobie Brother whose pipes powered hits like “What a Fool Believes”—providing vocals on “Show You the Way,” one of the 23 tracks on Thundercat’s sensational Drunk, his third solo release on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label.

“It just started as something I said on a radio station,” says Bruner, whose distinctive six-string electric bass work is all over recordings by Flying Lotus, Suicidal Tendencies and Erykah Badu, as well as game-changing projects from jazz saxophone renaissance man Kamasi Washington, Childish Gambino and Kendrick Lamar. “I was asked who would I want to be trapped on an island with. I immediately said, ‘Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald.’ People call [what they do] ‘yacht rock’ or something, but I was very serious at the same time I was joking about it. I have a lot of respect for them as songwriters and what they contributed to the music, being people that I learned from.”

Loggins was intrigued by the project and invited McDonald. “I was spazzing out! We fell in sync with each other. It could have gone so many ways,” says Bruner. “They said, ‘What do you want us to do?’ I said, ‘I want you to do exactly what you’ve always done.’ When we were mixing it, we were like, ‘No fuckin’ way!’ But the more we’d sit with it, the more it would be, ‘This really just happened.’”

There are many “No fuckin’ way!” moments— lyrical, instrumental, vocal, conceptual—all over Drunk, the title of which, says Bruner, came about because “of an overall feeling of ‘What’s going on right now? Is everyone fucking drunk?’” Musically, Drunk is a pastiche of glorious sonic surprises that obscure genre lines. Bruner’s songwriting has never been more complex and far-ranging; it’s well beyond what was suggested on his previous leader projects, and his vocals are soulful and assured. After helping so many others sound that much more powerful, he’s applied his lessons well and truly comes into his own here.

Before, Bruner says, the songwriting was often “hiding behind my instrument. It changed up for me with this one because the things that I had been working on, in and around it were so much more demanding of me. I didn’t know what was going on,” he jokes, “and now I really don’t know what’s going on. I’m a man out of time. I’ve experienced a lot,” he says, getting serious again. “It’s just a different time of life.”

Working with Lamar on the hip-hop visionary’s To Pimp a Butterfly had a particularly profound effect on Thundercat’s own way of making music. “There’s a part where you know the greatness of the person you’re working with,” he says. “Kendrick put himself on the chopping block. He took the risk of people not liking it or it being too black or too one-sided. But, for a moment, everybody understood what it means to be black. It reminds me of things like [Stevie Wonder’s] Songs in the Key of Life because of the effort that went behind it. He just opened up everybody’s eyes. It felt OK to be human, and that’s one reason that album stood out. I remember seeing how this guy was putting his all into it, and it absolutely affected me.”

At only 32, Bruner has already developed a bass language that has earned him a reputation as an innovator. He devoured all kinds of music while growing up in LA, with jazz fusion particularly having an impact—he often cites Stanley Clarke as a major influence—and then created something new when it was his turn. His ability to step into such a vast array of musical situations so readily has elevated his status. Recording and touring with many different artists, Bruner says, “has made me very open.”

Drunk, produced mainly by Flying Lotus, includes not only the surprise visit from Loggins and McDonald but also cameos from Lamar, Washington, Wiz Khalifa, Pharrell and others. “It was a bit of a never-ending process” making the album, Bruner says. “It stopped when I stopped and, when it stopped, that didn’t denote that it was time for an album. After a certain point, it took on its own life and we tried to capitalize on the idea of it being exactly just that.”

Now that he has Drunk and the extensive tour in support of the album behind him, Thundercat plans to return to the ominous feeling that inspired the title. “I’m thinking about moving to Mexico,” he says with a laugh. “I’ll be like Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa—the guy behind the bar, drinking.”