Giving the unexpected

When it comes to churning out hits, most musicians stick to the same recipe that gave them sweet success the first time around.

If a rapper’s shoot-em-up tales sold 8 million albums, there’ll be more on the follow-up. If a starlet’s skimpy outfits and booty-shaking lured fans to the record stores 5 million times, count on similar apparel and moves the next time.

One of the rare exceptions is hip-hop’s mad scientist, Missy Elliott. The rapper/singer/superproducer has kept her platinum status for almost a decade by giving fans the unpredictable, the unheard, the unfathomable each time out.

With surreal, sci-fi sounding grooves, out-there lyrics and trippy videos, Elliott has thrown listeners for a loop so many times that when something intoxicatingly weird makes its way to the radio, you can almost guess it’s her.

But with her sixth album, “The Cookbook” (released Tuesday), Elliott is giving her fans the unexpected once again by – gasp! – sounding a little more conventional.

“It’s more to the center,” says Elliott, flashing a grin. “It’s still left, it’s still Missy, that left Missy, but it meets that middle ground.”

Well, not quite middle ground.

Her first video, “Lose Control,” still has those head-scratching, eye-popping images that have made her a groundbreaking visual artist. And there still are those sex lyrics that are freaky enough to make Lil’ Kim pause.

Still, for those looking for that “where-did-that-come-from” groove that defies categorization, Elliott has gone and tinkered with the recipe. While right-hand man Timbaland is still providing hypnotic beats, for the first time Elliott has branched out, tapping the Neptunes and other producers to stretch her sound.

“We started just feeling like, ‘Wow, it sounds like Tim and Missy,’ which is fine, but … it was almost like what you expected from Tim and Missy, and I wanted to give people the unexpected,” says Elliott.

She didn’t want anything that sounded like 2003’s “This is Not a Test!” That was the follow-up to her 2002 “Under Construction,” her biggest seller (at 2.1 million copies), which produced hits like the sexually charged “Work It” and ended up on many critics’ “best of” lists.

But “This is Not A Test” fell flat with fans and critics alike and didn’t duplicate the double-platinum sales of “Under Construction.” It was her first album not to go platinum, selling just 690,000 copies.

Elliott says she was under pressure to produce another hit for her former record label, Elektra, which folded into Atlantic Records last year.

“It came out extremely too quickly for me. I didn’t want it to come out when it did,” she says.

So with “The Cookbook” – which boasts collaborations with Mary J. Blige, Slick Rick, Ciara, Fantasia and Mike Jones – Elliott made sure she took the time to get it right.

As she strokes her new “baby,” a Yorkie puppy named Poncho sleeping in her lap, she also cites “different experiences in your life that you want to talk about.”

Among the different experiences for Elliott: her UPN reality show “The Road To Stardom,” a talent competition that showed wannabes the struggles of making it to the top.

“I wanted people to see the stages before becoming an artist, like it’s a hard grind,” she says.

Like other rappers, she also has the requisite clothing line, Respect ME, after inking a deal with Adidas.

While most Elliott songs don’t talk much about painful emotional issues, in “My Struggles,” she briefly touches on the domestic abuse she witnessed as a child.

“I talked about my father being abusive to my mother – people have never heard me talk about anything like that. That brings people a little bit more personal with Missy,” says the notoriously private entertainer.

With this album, Elliott seems to be a little more willing to let the public into her world.

“I want to be on the cover of Us Weekly!” she says with a laugh.