"Steve Berlin said that working with us was like trying to work with the UN Security Council," says Tragically Hip guitarist Rob Baker.

Berlin, an acclaimed producer (and member of Los Lobos) who worked with the Tragically Hip on 1998's "Phantom Power" and 2000's "Music at Work," may have lamented the band's democratic structure, but it's obviously still working. Together for 26 years with its original line-up still intact, the Tragically Hip, now a Canadian institution, is living proof that inflated egos don't necessarily go hand in hand with success as a rock band. If the new album, "We Are the Same," with its songs populated by quote-unquote ordinary people, represents an overt attempt to relate to the audience's point of view, the bandmembers' working relationship with each other tells a much more convincing story about artists keeping their egos in check.

A departure from the abstract literary subject matter that lyricist/frontman Gordon Downie is known (and somewhat notorious) for, "We Are the Same" otherwise follows the trajectory of the band's 11 previous studio albums. Which is to say that it sounds different than all of them, yet somehow falls within the same general ballpark - meat-and-potatoes rock with a twist. And once again, The Tragically Hip manages to put a fresh twist on the twist. Baker insists that he and his bandmates have "never made a deliberate direction change," but the fact that they've changed direction so reliably over the years is undoubtedly a big part of what has kept fans coming back for more.

The driving force behind this wily, unpredictable nature is, of course, the band's writing process. Tragically Hip songs - the majority of which could pop up in the setlist at any given show, including deep cuts - usually start from an individual band member's idea, but almost always take shape in the crucible of group collaboration. Naturally, this working method isn't the speediest, and friction comes with the territory.

"Democracy," Baker says, "is not easy - not on any level. But at the end of the day, I would hope that we're an example that you can be a songwriting collective. It doesn't have to be that every record has two of my ideas, or two of everyone's ideas. It shouldn't matter who the songs come from. But, as a songwriter, I want to be encouraged. I want to have a crack at it, to have input. No one's in this to be a sideman. We all need to have a vested stake in what's happening on record and onstage."

Affording each member that stake, says Baker, has been the key to the band's longevity, which flies in the face of the enduring truism that equal partnerships can't work in music.

"Keeping the same line-up," he says, "hasn't been difficult at all. We solved that pretty early on. When we made the decision that we were going to share all the profit and songwriting credit five ways, it thwarted a lot of problems. Fighting over who wrote what on a song, and whose song is going to get chosen as a single, and if that song takes off, while one guy buys himself a BMW and everyone else is taking the bus... those are the things that kill bands. I've heard that argument that every band has to have a leader or two songwriting partners, but I don't know. There aren't many bands that have survived that way, either."

If it seems like a stretch to attribute this all-for-one attitude to some intangible aspect of the Canadian mindset, CBC morning talk show host Jian Ghomeshi recently spoke of the band as "defining [Canada], in a way." Unlike other Canadian artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, whose cultural perspective doesn't exactly jump out of their work, there is something unmistakably north-of-the-border about the Hip that goes beyond Downie's frequent references to Canadian geography. And, from the vantage point of its paradoxical status as a household-name cult act in the United States, the Hip is perhaps uniquely positioned to show American audiences a thing or two about ourselves that we just can't get from our own homegrown acts.

Baker doesn't necessarily agree.

"I don't see differences, for the most part," he says. "I think the differences are political. On the whole, Americans are the friendliest, most open people on the planet one-on-one. As a collective, though, they can be quite frightening. I don't mean that the wrong way, but America wields a lot of power, and that makes a lot of people nervous. But you'll never meet friendlier people anywhere - much more so than Canadians. I think Canadians are quite reserved and even cold. But very, very polite!"

Interestingly, Baker points to "New Orleans Is Sinking" (which Downie wrote in 1984) as a kind of signature song.

"In some weird way," he muses, "that song is emblematic of what the band is. It has all these poetic images flying through it that are based in a real place, yet are also a metaphor for a state of mind - all over a really straightforward, blues-based, heavy rock beat. There's a dichotomy between those two things. It's a strange marriage between an intelligent, poetic lyric and something that's aimed at your groin or your abdomen."

The Tragically Hip

Saturday, July 25

Highland Bowl, off South Ave.

7 p.m. | $35-$40 | 232-1900, ticketmaster.com