Fifty years after he started making music with Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely in Lubbock, Texas, Butch Hancock is ruminating on how the three childhood friends assembled “Treasure of Love,” the Flatlanders’ first new album in more than a decade. 

“Some people can make a case for thinking that we knew what we were doing,” he begins. “And we can make a pretty good case for claiming that we didn't know what we were doing. But we sure were having fun doing it.”

That classic Hancock blend of humor and philosophy could in fact sum up the entire career of this Texas trio. The Flatlanders first came to attention in the early 1970s with an album that wasn’t widely heard until much later, at which point they’d all followed separate career paths. A Rounder Records CD reissue of the album in 1990 was fittingly retitled “More a Legend Than a Band.”

Then a funny thing happened: The legend became a band again. Asked to collaborate on a new song for the soundtrack to Robert Redford’s 1998 film “The Horse Whisperer,” the three singer-songwriters — who’d stayed in touch over the years and made rare trio appearances — decided to record a new album. And then another. And another.

Those three releases — “Now Again” (2002), “Wheels of Fortune” (2004) and “Hills and Valleys” (2009) — returned the Flatlanders to their rightful place as one of Americana music’s most important and accomplished bands. A couple of archival sets, "Live '72" (recorded in Austin) and “The Odessa Tapes,” helped fill in more of the group’s back-history.

“Treasure of Love,” issued in July on Ely’s Rack ’Em Records via Nashville affiliate Thirty Tigers, features new studio recordings, though “new” doesn’t exactly describe the nature of the project. The material largely reaches back to the musicians’ 20-something days “when we were sitting around on the floor with no furniture and just swapping songs” at a house they shared in Lubbock, as Hancock recalls.

“It always seemed like a natural for the Flatlanders to do a record with songs we grew up on,” Ely says, explaining how “Treasure of Love” became a balancing act between “songs that we loved at an early age and songs that fit right in to what we’re doing now.”

“The only theme that tied it together was that it was songs we liked a lot,” Gilmore adds. “There wasn’t any concept or anything behind it.”

I spoke with Ely and Gilmore about the album in Austin in late June, and with Hancock by phone in mid-July.

Joe Ely: 'It just kind of evolved'

“I can’t say it was the hardest record I’ve ever done, but it was the longest,” says Ely, 74, the Flatlander with the most studio production experience.

Many of the basic tracks for “Treasure of Love” were recorded around a decade ago. When the pandemic hit, he had some time to dig into the stash and see what might be made of it. He invited Gilmore and Hancock out to listen to them. “Joe said, ‘If y’all like these enough, I’ll go to work on it,’” Gilmore recalls.

A turning point was when Ely decided to recruit Grammy-winning producer Lloyd Maines, an old friend from their Lubbock days who now lives in Austin. Maines and Ely ended up co-producing the album.

“We realized we hadn’t recorded with Lloyd outside of a few little things,” Ely says. That seems incredulous, given how intertwined their lives have grown over the decades. Maines, the father of The Chicks singer Natalie Maines, has either played on or produced many albums by each Flatlander individually, dating back to the late 1970s.

Maines didn’t just tweak the rough mixes. He upgraded the album significantly, layering his own pedal steel, dobro, mandolin, bass, guitar and harmony-vocal parts onto the basic tracks.

None of that had been envisioned when the trio cut the songs years earlier. “I keep coming to the word organic,” Ely says. “It was not planned out; it just kind of evolved.” He teases, too, that there’s more where “Treasure of Love” came from: “There’s another 20 songs in there somewhere.”.

Jimmie Dale Gilmore: 'I was retired'

Gilmore is typically considered the best singer of the group, but on “Treasure of Love,” the lead vocals are split almost equally: Gilmore and Ely each sing five, with Hancock singing four. That’s in keeping with the band’s history, he says, despite the group’s initial 1970s recordings that featured him as the primary singer.

“That was because I was the one on the recording contract,” he says. “But the way the band actually operated when we were playing together, before we made a record or anything, it was all of us. It wasn’t just me singing all the time.”

The new album’s closing track, the raucous rave-up “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” is a prime example, with each Flatlander taking a verse. Gilmore says he learned the song from a Doc Watson recording and used to play it in his own shows. “Everybody in the band loved it so much that it came to be natural that we all did it, and started trading verses on it,” he says.

One of Gilmore’s best lead vocals on “Treasure of Love” is the Bob Dylan classic “She Belongs to Me,” which might seem like new territory for the Flatlanders — except that they’ve been singing Dylan songs together from the very start, as it turns out.

Butch Hancock: 'You just jump in'

“Where should we begin? Or is there a beginning? Where should we continue?”

Those were Hancock’s first words to me from a hotel in Okemah, Oklahoma, where he was attending a festival celebrating native son Woody Guthrie’s 109th birthday. I’ve traveled many roads with Butch across the decades, including two raft trips down the Rio Grande in which he served as daytime boatsman and evening campfire troubadour.

One obvious topic was the three Hancock original tunes that appear on “Treasure of Love.” Two of them, both sung by Ely, had appeared on previous records: “Moanin’ of the Midnight Train” was on Hancock’s 1995 album “Eats Away the Night,” while Gilmore recorded “Ramblin’ Man” for his 2000 album “One Endless Night.”

The third, “Mama Does the Kangaroo,” dates back to the birth of Hancock’s son Rory around 23 years ago. As the title indicates, it’s essentially a children’s song, which begs the question of whether Hancock has ever considered making an album of children’s music.

“I’ve probably got enough songs to do it,” he says. “If silliness is a thing to consider, then I dang sure got it covered! And a lot of the songs that I would think might be for a more grown-up audience, kids love them.”