Our conversation is painful, marked by enough long pauses to fill an entire season of "The Office." Pharrell Williams, the singer and public face of N.E.R.D., is normally the chatty one, but right now he's so disinterested in my questions that he's making his less talkative bandmate Shay answer them from a third phone line. Though he struggles to be polite, Shay prefaces many of his short answers with a barely disguised sigh.  "Hey, P, you still there?"

Although their days of being guaranteed hitmakers may be behind them, the Neptunes production team has had a surprisingly long run. A decade after their beats cracked the charts, they continue to work with just about every big-name rapper and pop star in the industry. By comparison, N.E.R.D., the funk-rock band spearheaded by the Neptunes, was a flash in the pan. The group cut one o...