For someone who hasn't released a note of new music in 15 years, Bill Withers hardly seems to have been away at all.

His songs have appeared on soundtracks to "American Beauty", "Notting Hill", and "Jackie Brown", and his music has been covered or sampled by acts as diverse as Blackstreet, Club Nouveau, and Michael Bolton.

On top of that, he's just released his sixth (yes, sixth) compilation, "The Best Of Bill Withers: Lean On Me", a generous 18-track sampling of his enduring output and, incidentally, the reason he's on the line from his little-used office in his Los Angeles publishing company.

Just don't ask the man to feign active involvement in his latest project.

"I don't look at the world through a mirror, because then all you see is yourself and everything behind you," drawls a laid-back and philosophical Withers on the eve of his 62nd birthday (July 4).

"I'm somebody's husband, somebody's father, somebody's friend. If I keep trying to re-involve myself in that time in my life, then I'm in bad shape."

Withers -- who quips he was "probably in the Home Depot" when the decision was made about which songs would comprise his latest "Best Of" -- has decidedly ambivalent feelings about re-living the glory days of "Ain't No Sunshine", "Use Me", and "Just The Two Of Us", not to mention "fickle" record companies and, most of all, the people whose job it is to match artists with commercially viable material, a.k.a. A & R -- Artists & Repertoire. (Or, as Withers likes to call it, "Antagonistic and Redundant".)

"I'll give you an example," he says, warming up to the topic. "When I finished my second album -- which had 'Lean On Me' and 'Use Me' and all that kind of stuff -- I turned this record in because I got through doing my best, and I remember distinctly the head of the parent company was very upset, and his question was: 'Who let Bill Withers go in by himself and do this crap?'.

"Now, almost 30 years later, there's a whole other look at it, but I remember getting some resistance about some of the things that are now considered classics."

Which may be why Withers has stubbornly clung to the modus operandi of being "off somewhere probably doing yourself the biggest favour you ever did -- keeping your mouth shut and staying out of the way."

"I wish I could just sit in a room for hours and hours and hours, poring over a song," he says, almost contritely, "but there are too many other things for me to do, or try to do.

"It's like a box. Everything has a certain volume to it.

"If you're planning on buying some new clothes, you're gonna have to throw some old ones away, because your closet doesn't have an endless capacity. And neither does your head."

Still, he adds, "If I had known that the music that I was doing was going to be as enduring as some of it's been, I'd have probably done more of it. I didn't know the value of what I was doing when I was doing it. I had no idea that music I did in 1970, 1971 would still provide an income for me. If I did, hey man, that's all I would've done. I mean, I'd've squirted that stuff out."

These days, Withers busies himself by working on "a couple of pieces of property" he owns, and thinking a lot about his own mortality.

"We're all accidents of birth," he muses. "You look up one day and you become aware that you are. And somebody says, 'Okay, this is your name'. You don't name yourself. It's not your choice whether you're six feet or three feet or four feet, whether you're smart or retarded.

"I always find it interesting when somebody says, 'Well, I'm beautiful'. The question is, 'What did you do to get that way'?"

On the possibility of Withers ever making a return to writing and recording, he says, "Maybe I'll make some more music, maybe I won't," in a tone of voice that makes it clear that the possibility of inspiration striking again is not up to him.

What about the idea of just setting his warm, distinctive voice loose on an album of other people's songs?

"Oh, I love that," he says with an easy laugh. "You want me to tell you the truth? I have probably had as many people -- family members, band members -- people who can't wait to tell you that they don't think I'm much of a singer.

"I got relatives right now who think that there's 12 people in the family who can sing better than me.

"There was a time when I would've liked to have done that, but just from a practical point of view, it just doesn't seem like a good business decision to me to take the risk of taking the amount of money that it takes to record something, and go back and do a bunch of 'My Funny Valentines' and stuff.

A lot of people have done just that recently. Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt ...

"Yeah, well, there were a lot of people that made love to their sheep last night, that's got nothing to do with me," says Withers, breaking into roaring laughter.

Circling back around to the reason we began talking in the first place, Withers finally grows animated.

"You say you've seen six best-ofs? This ain't the last one. Wait'll I die. They're gonna throw another one.

"Louis Armstrong had a great quote. He said, 'Better has-been than never-was'. So I think the biggest compliment the music business can pay you is to do best-offs, because everybody that made a record doesn't get a best-of. So each time they do a best-of, it revalidates you."

Laughing again, he adds, "It would really be the coup de grace if, when I died, some station said, 'Well, today we're gonna play exclusively Bill Withers.'

"That," he says, "is the ultimate best-of."