They Might Be Giants don’t show a lot of growth from one album to the next, and they don’t really need to. The Else, the duo’s 12th album in 25 years, finds keyboardist John Linnell’s mild-mannered quirkiness edging out guitarist John Flansburgh’s innate rockism. Of course, the two Johns are still all over the map, from “The Mesopotamians,” a would-be TV theme song about an underground band, to “The Shadow Government,” a punk protest song for drug dealers, to “Upside Down Frown,” a pop ditty about perpetual cheerfulness, to “Contrecoup,” a guitar-strumming ode to head injuries. The Dust Brothers’ production pushes the songs popwards with loops, textures, and effects, some of them (“I’m Impressed,” “The Cap’m”) more effective than others (“Withered Hope,” “Bee Of The Bird Of The Moth”). But as always, the strongest songs here are seriously hilarious and hilariously serious, and performed live, where TMBG has always shined, they’ll stand alongside their best.

After flying home from San Diego, Flansburgh crawled out of bed, fired up a cup of Brooklyn-brewed coffee and started talking.

Did you really just wake up when I called?
Yup. What did you think, that I’m not in a band? Musicians often wake up at noon. I flew back from the West Coast last night, got in late, and couldn’t get to sleep until even later.

Are you surprised to be making a living at this after more than 20 years?
I was surprised to be making a living after five years. Being a musician is a really difficult, unreasonable career path. You can be a very interesting, creative band, but if you’re not seen as culturally of the  moment, if you don’t have that booster rocket of being fashionable, you’re probably not going to last very long. Bands like us are traditionally very unlucky, and I think we’ve actually been extremely lucky all the way down the line. At this point, we’re essentially off the grid of rock culture. So it doesn’t surprise me now that we’re doing well, because we’ve found an audience for what we do, and we’re very open to that audience.

When the first record came out, I was working at a radio station, and I remember thinking, “These guys are never going to make it to our FM air.”
Twenty years later, we’re probably still not on your FM air.

You’re right.
What makes this worth doing isn’t related to mainstream success. Our concerns are much more internal, and being in this project has actually been really easy. People are surprised that John and I have been in a band for 25 years, but it’s really not that hard. We’ve been doing something really, really fun for 25 years, and it’s been a gas. Imagine how much happier we are than most people! It’s true: We get to do what we want, and we’re very proud of what we do. Record companies are totally scared to tell us what to do, because they have no idea what’s good or bad about this music. It’s kind of perfect.

What’s the most fun you had on The Else?
Having the time to fix it. We work faster than most bands, and for better or worse, we probably come into the studio with a stronger idea of what we want to do. Opening ourselves up to experiment in the studio is a luxury we don’t often afford ourselves, so working with the Dust Brothers, who are much more careful than we are, and who explore a lot of alternatives in the studio, really opened our eyes to other ways of working. Consequently, the whole album holds together better and is more successful from track to track.

How does this album feel different from the last 11?
We’re usually recording on a deadline and with a really looming budget. This time, because we were doing so many side projects for TV and movies and advertising, we could piggyback our sessions for The Else. We were doing a half-dozen things over the course of 2006 and 2007, so we were recording all the time. I’m not saying this is the end-all, be-all way of making an album, but we usually spend a lot of time working very quickly and trying to rise to the challenge of getting it done. For The Else, we decided we wouldn’t be finished until we felt it was right.

How many days could you spend on a single song?
There was a long gestation period for a lot of these songs. There are some we recorded off and on for a year and a half—like “Careful What You Pack,” which is a really simple song, but it has this electronic layer of stuff that goes across the whole song. That was added a year after the song had been officially tracked, just as the final mix was being done. It’s kind of a mysterious song, it’s different for us in a lot of ways, and I felt that sonically it wasn’t as big an adventure as it should be. So very, very late in the process, I added this plastic layer of texture that percolates along the top, which really adds to the mystery.

Is it as much fun as writing and recording a song in a single day?
It’s all fun. Doing different stuff is fun. Always doing the one, most-fun thing is not necessarily a winning strategy, as any drug addict will tell you. So we do a lot of things on extremely tight deadlines, which is actually exciting. We did all the music for The Daily Show. We did a TV commercial a month ago, a totally faceless project for a Sony camera. For 24 hours, I was completely immersed in this microscopic postage-stamp piece of music. Then two days later, it was on the air, which was exciting in its own crazy, manic way. It was not a transcendent piece, it wasn’t something I would put on my tombstone, but it was a very cool job of problem-solving. For years, we were just writing, recording and touring. At the time, it seemed like a complicated life. But around 2000, our creative engine really got going, and looking back now, that seems like a vacation compared to the craziness of doing all this outside work. We did a whole epic project for Dunkin’ Donuts last year, with about 30 different spots. They’re faceless—it’s not like people know it’s us, which is actually a liberating place to be as a writer. The strangest assignment of all: We got a last-minute call to do the theme to (the upcoming revival of) The Mickey Mouse Club. The song had to have the chorus “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E,” but it couldn’t use the original melody. So our version zigs where the original zags, coming down when the other comes up. It was a real challenge.

What other projects are you working on?
We’re going to do at least 100 shows in the United States this year, which is a major amount of roadwork. Really, we never wanted to be a studio project. We took on our first sideman in 1991 or 1992, and it immediately felt different, having the power of a live rhythm section behind us. It was very celebratory, but it didn’t feel as organic as playing with just the two of us—because it wasn’t. There was definitely an upside, but it took us about 10 years to get used to having a live rhythm section. When you’re working electronically, everything sounds singular, like a new version of an old idea. You can do a drum pattern from a Beatles album, and it sounds infinitely more contemporary when you’re working with electronic components. But when you do the same thing with a live rhythm section, you just sound like a cover band. So it took us a while to figure out what we were losing and what we could gain. Over the last five years or so, we’ve had the same lineup and it has really turned into a very cohesive unit.

Why is the album called The Else?
The Else is just a made-up word. It could have been called The Other, but The Else was a way to add a layer of unknowability to the equation. By the time most bands get to their 12th album, they’re in this completely grotesque, mannerist period where everything they started doing is distended and distorted. We didn’t want to fall into that trap, and we didn’t want to just take on some transparently phony veneer that would somehow make this album feel new. At this point in our lives, to be who we are, we really have to dig in and do the best work we can. I know that sounds like some self-help seminar speech, but there aren’t a lot of options for us besides straight-up. So the title reflects where we think the band falls in the world. We’re outsiders. We’re just not part of the world.

What’s the best thing John Linnell does on this album?
I could talk for a long, long time about the greatness of John Linnell. He has this incredible sense of balancing the familiar with the surprising, which, as a songwriter, is always the big question, because you’re working in a form that’s basically a confection. You’re putting together musical ideas that have really long traditions, but without that spark of something new, none of it is going to mean much. John has a very savvy way of isolating really interesting, volatile new ideas and putting them into song structures that make the music sound really original.

What are your best moments on this album?
I edited myself very closely this time, but of all the things I did, I’d say “Careful What You Pack” for its simplicity and “Take Out the Trash” for its immediacy. We’ve been doing all these live shows, and to see people respond to “Take Out the Trash” has been really exciting. It has the hook of a pop song, where you hear it and you get it immediately.

I think of They Might Be Giants as a singles band, like the kind of bands we grew up listening to 40 years ago. Do you think that’s fair?
I know what you’re saying, because that’s how people know us, and we’re not the only band in the world that perceives itself in a way that’s fundamentally different from the way everyone else in the world receives us. There are so many choices that an album can totally shift in shape and style from track to track.

As songwriters, that’s an inviting idea. You think, “This song is so different from the last that it’ll be really exciting for the listener.”

So about five years ago, we made an album called Mink Car with all these different producers in all these different studios. It was an album of all singles, and we thought, “This is going to be phenomenal! It’s going to be totally bulletproof!” And there are some glorious tracks on that album, but when you sit down and listen to it, it’s this Dr. Frankenstein experience, like some midnight chop-shop combination of songs. We learned from that, and even though the album as a concept is dying, we wanted to make a stand. As a band, it’s late in the day for us, too, but this is probably our first conscious effort to do something that really worked as an album. Even though we were working in different places over a long span of time, we made sure to have the same engineer and the same band for the whole record. There was a real continuity in what we were doing.

Generally, we write on a song-by-song basis and divide songs into albums that we hope will hold together. The reason some songs end up being embraced is a mystery to us, because we’ve never worked that way, from the very beginning. “Don’t Let’s Start,” which was our breakout song, was out for a year before people really took notice. In hindsight, everyone agrees that’s clearly the song on that record. But at the time, it just seemed like another song. Who knows what kind of band we are? I certainly don’t.