“It’s just that idea of going crazy on the dance floor, acting like an animal — just letting it all hang out,” David Brogan said.

A parallel to his confident demeanor, Animal Liberation Orchestra’s drummer described his band’s name proudly.

“It’s sort of a rebellion,” he said.

Now touring — including a stop this coming Tuesday at the Paradise — to promote their most recent album, Roses and Clover, the boys of ALO were once a small Santa Barbara band struggling to find a balance between real musicality and ear-candy commercialism, Brogan said.

“We’ve gone through so many style changes,” he said. “When I first joined, they were playing alternative rock pop rock, and it sort of shifted into country rock and funk . . . a James Brown-type of thing — a little bit funkier.”

“There was a jazz funk phase,” he continued. “We got into dance house electronica a little bit and it finally turned into this funky, ritzy thing.”

Brogan said he joined the band in college at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he said bands were as frequent and undistinguished as the broken gravel driveways they played on.

After his fellow bandmates graduated, Brogan teamed up with ALO’s Zach Gill, Steve Adams and Dan Lebowitz — all friends from high school — an easy decision, he said.

“They were drumerless and I was bandless,” he said.

Fifteen years later, ALO is signed to Jack Johnson’s Brushfire label. Brogan said the idea of being a professional musician is still nearly inconceivable.

“That moment? Yeah, I have that moment a lot,” he said. “‘God, this is so cool.’ I don’t know, I feel really lucky, but we’ve worked on our stuff so hard and so long. We never really like shot up or skyrocketed, it was small steps and small increments.”

“That’s the cool thing about ALO — it always feels like it’s increasing and progressing,” he continued. “Every show, a few more people come. It’s a slow, steady progression. It gives you time to digest what’s happening.”

In response to reviews of Clover — the band’s sixth project — which have called the LP more mainstream than previous ventures, Brogan said pop stigmas don’t scare him.

“Of course we’d like to get a song on the radio,” he said. “We have that in mind for some of the songs, but what we were really interested in is honing our personal craft — making songs more efficient and tighter.”

When his sticks are drawn overhead in anticipation of the next strike, Brogan said he’s thinking of Jack White, Jack Johnson and The Flaming Lips, his favorite artists at the moment.

“The Lips are just a master of follow-through,” he said. “You can tell that somebody gets an idea and it just happens — like, ‘We’re going to get 30 people on stage on bunny suits.’

“It’s one thing to have that idea,” he continued. “We have ideas like that all the time, but it’s a different thing to make it happen.”

Although the band has yet to take the stage in bunny suits, Brogan said the band tries to bring something new and exciting to match the diversity of the crowd.

“A song like ‘Empty Vessel,’ people don’t usually get excited about it,” he said. “But we went to Japan and people went crazy over it. We never had that kind of response ever before from that song.”

“It’s different everywhere,” he added. “We try to follow a jam band tradition and do something different every night — a lot of spontaneity and in-the-moment creativity. Some bands play the same set every night, but we’re trying to create brand new moments that have never existed before.”

Though he admitted ’70s rock a la Ambrosia and Dave Mason is his guilty pleasure, Brogan did not hesitate to sound off on the state of today’s prime bubblegum pop.

As for Britney’s VMA performance? He has his theories.

“I think that it was a publicity stunt,” he said. “Everyone is going to watch her to see if she sucks again, and I guarantee she won’t. She’s going to be badass.”