When contemplating his upcoming 58th birthday on May 6, John Flansburgh mused about how aging has affected him.

"It's OK, but it's getting harder to find parts," he said in a deadpan fashion

He and his bandmate John Linnell maybe getting older, but they certainly haven't slowed down as far as musical output. The duo recently released its 20th studio album, I Like Fun, and has released four albums in the past two years alone.

The duo will be bringing songs from those albums as well as the rest of their 35-year career to the Academy of Music in Northampton on Thursday at 8 p.m.

Flansburgh said although they may seem constantly busy, the band's musical output ebbs and flows at times.

"Sometimes we feel like we are on a roll, and other times we feel like we need more time. The reality is that we know how to schedule our efforts, and that kind of gives the illusion of hyperactivity," he said.

But unlike many other bands, They Might Be Giants doesn't write songs on the road, he said.

"A long time ago we realized we weren't capable of writing on the road, which is something a lot of people try to do. But when we really started going on longer runs, we figured out that it was really kind of unfair to yourself as a creative person to think that you can deal with all the business of doing the shows and also write songs," he said. "But once we are in a quiet, peaceful space, it's not hard to get the urge to write a song."

One thing that keeps the writing fresh is the way they collaborate. Although sometimes they write individually, they often write together - although not in the traditional sense.

Flansburgh described the method they used for one song, "Thinking Machine," where he created an elaborate drum program, then sent the file to Linnell, who put the bass line over it and sent it back to Flansburgh with a set of lyrics. Flansburgh then wrote the melody over the bass line and rhythm track and recorded the keyboard part. Finally, Linnell did a set of answer vocals to the vocals that Flansburgh had sung.

"It's really like 100 miles away from a Tin Pan Alley form of collaboration," he said. "So it's hard to say how our collaboration is even structured. We both have studios and we trade files. And sometimes it's just that I'll hand off something to John or John will hand off something to me and that's the end of it. But there are some things that are surprisingly freeform in the way they're constructed."

Having been playing for more than three decades, the duo has seen the vicissitudes of the music industry. Flansburgh thinks that a band like They Might Be Giants is actually well situated in the current Wild West landscape of music.

"I don't think there's ever an easy time to be a musician. Of all the professions to have, it seems like an unreasonably hard one. And careers are often very short and talented people are cheated out of a good time," he said. "But we persevered simply because we persevered. We had some good luck and we've gone through some of the bumps. But people's tolerance for failure is different. If we were more hell-bent on being famous, we might not be satisfied with where we're at, but that's never been our main objective."