When the Flatlanders came to Ann Arbor in April 2009, it had been five years since this Texas roots music band of brothers was previously in town.

But, as it turns out, we didn’t have to wait nearly as long this time: The Flatlanders return to The Ark on Sunday. And this time, they’re not even promoting a new album.

Since 2002, when the group's core members — Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and Joe Ely — “officially reunited” after a 30-year break, they’ve typically toured right after releasing a new album, and then, at tour’s end, gone back to their solo careers and other projects for roughly three to five years. (They’ve released three albums since 2002. The most recent, “Hills And Valleys,” came out in the spring of 2009.)

“Yeah, with us, everything is sort of a continuous experiment, start to finish,” jokes Hancock, referring to the trio’s “lack of a plan,” as he calls it.

“We don’t really have a set way of doing things. We all do our own solo records and shows, and then, at some point, we’ll drift back together, and start writing songs, and keep writing ‘em till we have enough for an album,” says Hancock.

And now and then, they’ll put together a mini-tour, which is what this one is — they’re only going out for about three weeks, mostly playing Midwestern cities, says Hancock.

“In fact, right now, Jimmie Dale is in the studio, making a bluegrass album with Warren Hellman and his band, the Wronglers,” says Hancock during a late-October phone interview from his home in Terlingua, Texas, 12 miles from the Mexican border. (Hellman is the 76-year-old investment banker, bluegrass fanatic and organizer of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco.)

They also did a mini-tour in September — “it was Tom Russell’s ‘Roots on the Rail’ tour; we traveled by train to do shows in resort towns in New Mexico and Colorado,” says Hancock. “That was a blast.”

The set list for this show will be a bit different than The Ark show last year, says Hancock: “We’ll still do a few from ‘Hills And Valleys,’ and the usual favorites, but we’ll also being throwing in a few new songs that we’ve written individually.”

For those who aren’t familiar with the Flatlanders’ legend and legacy, here’s a brief history: Hancock and Gilmore met in the 7th grade in Lubbock, then met Ely in high school. By 1972, they’d formed a band, and recorded an album in Nashville that was never properly released — it was only available on 8-track tape, and sold at oddball “outlets” like truck stops and convenience stores.

But it was heavily bootlegged, and became a big influence on the neo-traditionalist country-folk movement of the 1980s (which later evolved into the alt-country movement of the ‘90s). By the time that ’72 recording was finally, properly released on CD in 1990, Hancock, Ely and Gilmore had each become individual cult heroes on the strength of their heady songwriting and their sympathetic and inspired mingling of country, folk, rock and Tex-Mex sounds. So the album was fittingly titled “More a Legend Than a Band.”

All three core members are very politically aware and active. So, several of their more recent songs, on “Hills And Valleys” addressed, explicitly or implicitly, the darkness that America has faced down over the last several years — the Iraq / Afghan wars, Hurricane Katrina, the ugly immigration debate and the worst recession in 80 years.

For example, the elegiac “Homeland Refugee” soberly sifted through the wreckage of the American Dream — the Great Recession and the foreclosure crisis. In the song, Ely pointedly sang, “I’m leaving California for the dust bowl” — which was the inversion of the path followed by migrant workers during the Depression. Listen to the Flatlanders "Homeland Refugee" (MP3). “Borderless Love,” meanwhile, was fittingly rendered in accordion-fueled, Tex-Mex fashion, and depicted the human, personal side of the Mexican-immigration issue and the talk of building a wall at the border — a topic that Hancock is all too familiar with, living, as he does, on the border.

Another track, “After the Storm,” was inspired by Katrina, although the song never refers to Katrina by name. But Gilmore employed his quavering, high-lonesome voice to heartrendingly convey the feelings of loss that are experienced after a “storm” — and which can be interpreted either literally or metaphorically.

Hancock says there is no “set process” when it comes to their songwriting collaborations. “Sometimes, one of us will come in with a pretty good chunk of a song written, but then it ends up being torn apart and put back together. Sometimes, just a guitar riff is the starting point.”

One reason they went five years between their 2004 CD, “Wheels of Fortune,” and “Hills and Valleys” is because “since there’s three of us, it’s hard to come up with a finished product that all of us are happy with. We each have a different set of filters, in terms what we like or don’t like. By the time a song is finished, it’s been through some pretty heavy tests.

“I’m glad I’m not the song, to have to be ripped apart like that all the time,” jokes Hancock, who says that after all these years, he still doesn’t know “where songs come from. I’ve tried to analyze it, and I’ve even sort of observed myself when writing, but I still don’t know how they osmose into so-called ‘reality.’”

Hancock has heard die-hard Flatlanders fans claim that they can tell who wrote what line. “But the truth is, by the time we’re done, most of the time, even we don’t even remember who wrote what.”

In terms of his solo recordings, Hancock says he is “past due, and I’m trying to catch up. I have a whole mess of hew songs that I haven’t recorded yet, and I’m going to be getting into the studio pretty soon and get those recorded.”

Given their unpredictable history, one hesitates to ask when work might begin on a new Flatlanders album, but I posed the question anyway.

“We really don’t make plans when it comes to that, but I can sort of feel it coming on,” predicted Hancock. “I think we’ll be ready to give it another shot, right after the first of the year.”

You heard it here first.

Kevin Ransom, a freelance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com, first interviewed Butch Hancock in 1995, for New Country magazine. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.

Flatlanders performing live in Dallas this summer: