By Brett Milano

Even when they were pop stars, the members of 10,000 Maniacs weren’t really pop stars. “That didn’t have much effect on us because we live in Jamestown,” says keyboardist Dennis Drew, speaking from the rural upstate New York town where he’s still based. “So we played ‘Saturday Night Live’ and everybody’s patting us on the back for the next couple of weeks. And after that I’m still the guy who used to play Little League with you.”

Much of the pop stardom ended when singer Natalie Merchant went solo in 1993 but the band has endured; and Drew is one of four founding members still aboard (only Merchant and the late guitarist Rob Buck are missing). Backup singer and string player Mary Ramsey stepped up as frontwoman in ’93 and has usually been there ever since; she’s lately returned to the band after a short hiatus where Leigh Nash of Sixpence None the Richer took over. (For the record, Drew says they’re on friendly terms with Merchant but don’t have much contact). Playing songs from all their eras, the band appears at Somerville Armory on May 28.

“People still yell Natalie’s name sometimes, but the bulk of our fans have seen us many times over the years and stuck with us,” says Drew. “It was hard work for Mary to replace Natalie, but she did it. We’ve been at it for 44 years now so we take things a little slower, we changed our schedule so we only go out once a month now. But I can still remember playing the Rathskeller in Boston, just when we were starting to break. I remember people hanging off the rafters that night.”

They’re currently wrapping up a studio album they’ve been working on for some time, which will be their first in a decade. “It’s Maniacs music, which means it’s a little bit of everything. We have a few songs that are in a folk-rock vein, and a couple that are a little darker, more in our Joy Division vibe. And we unearthed an old Rob Buck demo that we’ve turned into a new song.”

They’re also playing some deep cuts to mark the 30th anniversary of their major-label debut “The Wishing Chair” — which didn’t have any hit singles, but whose English folk-inspired sound made it a fan favorite. “A lot of that sound came from (guitarist/songwriter) John Lombardo, he’s a real Anglophile. But living in Jamestown we’re at the foothills of the Appalachians, so the bluegrass and generalized folk music was always a big part of our milieu.”

The most surprising oldie that’s turned up in recent setlists is “Peace Train,” the Cat Stevens song that was their breakthrough hit in 1987. But after Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) appeared to support the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the Maniacs not only stopped playing the song but had it removed from their album. “He actually reached out to us at that time and said he wasn’t in favor of the fatwa and was just expressing his faith. We accepted that but we still didn’t play the song for almost 30 years. So now we’ve made peace with the song, and it’s our little nod to the fact that we all need to make peace with each other.”