Making a record is never a casual matter for Damon & Naomi. The release of their new The Earth Is Blue (on their own 20/20/20 label) marks a full year’s worth of agonizing over mixes and arrangements and even reordering the song sequence. During that time, they dismantled and rebuilt their home studio, rethought their musical direction, ended a longstanding relationship with Sub Pop, and started up their label — all while still running Exact Change, the publishing company they started in 1990. And now that the record is out, they may finally see the outside of their home.

"We started work in September of 2003, and we’ve barely been out since then," sighs singer/bassist/keyboardist Naomi Yang over tea at the Middle East. Such is life for this artful duo, who are fiercely independent and a little obsessive about what they do. Early in the sessions, for instance, they laid down some basic tracks with guitarist Michio Kurihara of the Japanese psychedelic group Ghost, a favorite collaborator of theirs in recent years. Feeling inspired at the time, Kurihara wound up filling all 16 available tracks on their recording console with guitar parts. Not wanting to erase anything, D&N instead built themselves a new 24-track studio. "He played so beautifully that we just said, ‘Tape it all, we’ll sort it out later,’ " singer/drummer/guitarist Damon Krukowski recalls. "We had to sell our equipment and buy new equipment. Every time we make a record, it takes more time and uses more tracks."

The duo have never taken anything like an obvious career path. Their late-’80s band, Galaxie 500 (which included Dean Wareham of Luna), never recorded for a major, and they played a heady, gentle psychedelia when garage rock was all the rage. Not an obvious commercial prospect by any means, but their three-album catalogue is still in print (on Rykodisc) 15 years later. As owners of Exact Change, they’ve reissued seminal texts by the likes of John Cage, Gertrude Stein, and Salvador Dal’, all of which were passed over by mainstream presses. Krukowski also published a book of his own poetry last year, and he occasionally writes about music in these pages. And as a musical duo, Damon & Naomi have gained an international cult following by exploring the darker corners of folk and psychedelic rock.

So the real surprise is that with The Earth Is Blue, they’ve made a full-fledged pop album — at least, the closest thing to one they’ve done since Galaxie days. Subtle beauty remains their stock in trade, but the familiar austere, folkish sound has grown into something far lusher. They’ve done away with the harmonium and turned down the acoustic guitars, adding layers of horns (courtesy of local trumpeter Greg Kelley and saxophonist Bhob Rainey) and keys and finally making the most of Yang’s classically lovely voice. There are bass and drums on every track, so a bit of the Galaxie groove sneaks in. Toward the end of the disc comes "The Robot Speaks," which is as close to a flat-out rocker as they’ve ever recorded. Yes, most of the million guitar tracks that Kurihara laid down are in there somewhere, though they’re largely used in textural ways that enhance the melodies. And whereas Damon & Naomi have covered obscure cult heroes like Tom Rapp, Tim Hardin, and Tim Buckley in the past, this time there’s a song by a fairly well-known outfit called the Beatles.

Not that the idea of doing a pop record necessarily went down easy. One of the emblematic Demon & Naomi stories involves the recording of their previous studio album, Damon & Naomi with Ghost (Sub Pop). They figured that one of their songs was starting to sound like the early-’70s British act Soft Machine, so they asked Ghost’s keyboardist to emulate the organ sound of Soft Machine’s Mike Ratledge. As Krukowski tells it, "He was wailing away on the organ, exactly like Ratledge did, but he said, ‘I can not do that! We will be killed!’ Guess we couldn’t bring ourselves to do something that easy."

So there you have it: an act whose idea of doing something cheap and superficial is to emulate the sound of a long-defunct, prog/jazz cult band that maybe a few thousand people remember.

"I’d say we were less afraid to give into some kind of pop clichÎs than we’ve been in the past," Krukowski acknowledges. "We can admit now that we like a lot of ’70s music that we know isn’t really great. I was even listening to some Fleetwood Mac during the mixing — not Tusk, though, because I can’t really take them when they get artsy. I’ve never thought we had a very good ear for that kind of sound. When we get close to pop, we ruin it — probably to our own artistic benefit and commercial detriment. I’m under no delusions here; I know we sound like ourselves whatever we do. But maybe these songs aim for different ideals that we hadn’t indulged before. I wouldn’t mind having a bigger audience, and I think we’re feeling a little less snooty . . . "

"Speak for yourself," Yang shoots back. "I’ve never been snooty; I’ve always been grateful for every single fan we have. What’s different for me is that I’ve gotten more comfortable about singing, and it took a lot of agonizing to get to this point. I still don’t listen to Galaxie 500 records; the ones I sing on make me feel slightly like crawling under the table. I can physically remember the fear around doing those. It seems that other people are less inhibited about losing their inhibitions in public."

"To me this is the Naomi record vocally," Krukowski concludes. "I’m the comic relief."

The new attitude partly explains where the Beatles cover, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," comes in — though it’s worth noting that they covered George Harrison’s original demo (which has a different feel and an extra verse) and that Yang’s vocal, the best of the album, if not her whole career, gets closer to the song’s underlying heartache than the Fab Four version did. "It’s easy to cover a song nobody knows, but in this case it’s a song everybody in the world has heard," Yang observes. Adds Krukowski, "We took it as a challenge. For one thing, everyone associates that song with Eric Clapton’s guitar-hero solo, and we wanted to hear what our own guitar hero, Kurihara, could do with it. But we were also thinking of the story that George Harrison went to Abbey Road on his birthday and made that demo by himself, so to us it’s the sad birthday song." Yang finishes, "It’s a very affecting song, about the fruitlessness of certain relationships. And it’s an emotional turning point on the album."

Nothing can be more pop than a concept album, and D&N admit, with a certain amount of reluctance, that they’ve made one: "God, this sounds so Spinal Tap — ‘Hey man, this record has a beginning, middle and end! It may even have some parts before the end and near the middle.’ " In fact, the duo have been politically active over the past few years — they worked with Thurston Moore and others in the loose-knit group Musicians for Peace — and one starting point for their disc was the prospect of Bush’s being re-elected. "The idea didn’t get very far, but we meant it to be a community record, with people we’ve met in different parts of the world," Yang says. Instead, they worked touches from African, Brazilian, and English music into the songs. Krukowski explains, "We were thinking that George Bush wants to create a world where you can’t go abroad, the dollar is worth less, everybody hates Americans. So we’re interested in the rest of the world, even if he isn’t. We wanted to say something positive in the midst of really dark times, and that’s as political as it gets."

The new disc also coincides with the shake-up in their business life: for the first time, they have a manager (Ben Goldberg, who runs the Ba Da Bing label) and their own record label, after years with Sub Pop. Krukowski explains, "Nothing ever soured artistically with Sub Pop, it just seemed like we were tired of asking other people to do things for us. Other people should take care of you when you’re young and in a band, it’s a parent/child relationship. I think we were ready to take care of ourselves."