“In that one or two lines of that song, that significantly portrays the power of the dB’s,” reminisces Peter Holsapple. “[It] was the kind of thing you put on your girlfriend’s mix tape if you wanted to woo her.”

This disclosure from Holsapple, the dB’s guitarist, was his response after I informed him that I had first heard his band’s name mentioned in “Twister,” a They Might Be Giants song. What I didn’t mention was that the first few time, I heard it I just scratched my head and wondered why the band had name dropped the BeeGees. Nor did I reveal that it was a number of years before I actually came across one of the band’s records. I’m happy to admit that, after those realizations—one of which came in the form of a CD split-reissue of the group’s first two records, Stands for Decibels and Reprecussion—the song’s couplet made a hell of a lot more sense in reference to the defiantly pop band born of the ashes of New York’s late-’70s punk scene.

The dB’s were a power-pop band’s power-pop band, one of the few rock outfits that might actually be able to go head-to-head against the Velvet Underground as the rightful heir to that old adage that everyone who bought their debut record went on to form a band.

“We’ve made a lot of friends over the years who happened to be musicians,” Holsapple admits, with all the modesty he can muster. Nearly two decades after their breakup, they’re adding names, like Steve Earle and Yo La Tengo to the roster—Holsapple himself has spent the last dozen years on the road with Hootie and the Blowfish, though that perennial adult contemporary act is a bit less revealing than some of the names that litter the stories of the band’s early history—like Television, REM and Alex Chilton—though, unlike the Big Star frontman’s tribute in the guise of a Replacements single, future dB’s historians will have to settle for a couplet in a TMBG song, which tells the tale of an embittered woman going to collect a few pop records in the wake of a nasty breakup. Well, that and a history that has managed to live on through generations of lovingly crafted mix tapes—and its file-sharing present day counterpart: a testament to the timeless power of a well-crafted pop song, if ever there were one.

“The way most of the people heard the dB’s was that some ardent listener brought his copy into the radio station and played it,” says Holsapple. “It’s not like we got serviced. It’s not like there was a Warner Bros. or a Capital with a street team. So a lot of stuff ended up on people’s mix tapes. It would be completely off-base for me to say that sharing songs was not a good thing.”

More than 20 years later, the music has managed to bring the members’ divergent paths back together again, first in the form of a cover of Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” a tribute to the victims of Katrina, which destroyed Holsapple’s New Orleans-area home, and now as a one-off show at the Bowery Ballroom. As for the future, Holsapple makes no promises, except that, like times past, everything is a distant second to the search for the perfect pop song.

“There’s no point in putting out a record, unless its better than the last one,” concedes Holsapple. “There’s plenty of people who get back together, and it’s like a rent party. That’s fine, but there weren’t that many people to see us around the first time, so I don’t know if we were deluding ourselves into thinking it was a bigger thing. Much like Mission of Burma and The Go-Betweens who have come out and done wonderful records, we’d like to do that.”

Jan. 13, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St. (betw. Bowery & Chrystie St.), 212-533-2111; 8, $16/$18.