Scott McMicken sounds tired.

Not that this seems to be impeding his live-wire mind, a seemingly unstoppable flow of ideas issuing down the line in the slightly cracked tones of one who’s pulled one too many all-nighters. Which may well be the case. One half of the tag-team songwriting duo behind five-piece retro-pop outfit Dr Dog, McMicken has just returned to the group’s home city of Philadelphia after an exhausting five weeks of relentless touring around North America in the wake of the band’s exceptional fifth LP Fate.

With so much time spent on the road, I wonder how the home music scene compares with elsewhere.

“Philly is one of the more interesting and accommodating places to be a musician,” says McMicken affectionately, “because it’s still a relatively inexpensive place to live… and there’s obviously no way to deny an incredible live music scene, because there are venues that have been in this city like institutions for decades and then there are new venues popping up all the time.”

It’s been a long road for Dr Dog. Formed back in 1999, the band remained Philadelphia’s best-kept secret until 2004 when they toured in support of My Morning Jacket. Since then, things have slowly taken off, positive buzz around Easy Beat (2005) as well as their wonderfully live-affirming 2007 opus We All Belong being nudged along by touring slots in support of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Strokes and The Raconteurs as well as the odd appearance on Letterman and Conan O’Brien.

Considering this history, it’s hardly surprising that McMicken believes that success is only ever achieved incrementally through strenuous effort.

“We’ve never really been this kind of overnight phenomenon where people just find out about us and suddenly everything changes” he tells me. “Everything we’ve achieved as a band and everywhere we’ve gotten ourselves has been this slow kind of culmination of one foot in front of the other, and word of mouth has always been a part of what improves our situation.”

Which, for a band that has tended to feel most at home in the studio (they have their own one too… lucky bastards), has meant touring, and plenty of it. With the songs that make up Fate, the band tailored their arrangements in response to the pressures of live performance.

“They’ve taken a while for us to kind of get a grip on, how to kind of carry the dynamic of them, how to carry the vibe of them. It’s not super-complicated stuff by any means, but from where we’re coming from. Those songs have definitely offered us some new dimensions on the stage.”

He goes even step further, explaining that Fate was “more or less putting our first step forward into learning how to make live recordings or to even have the ambition to do that.”

Ambition is the key word here. McMicken, fellow songwriter Toby Leaman and the rest of the band obviously having it in spades. He enthuses at length about the myriad benefits and joys of being in the enviable position of having complete creative control over every aspect of the music-making process.

“We’re doing the engineering of the record,” he says, “and we’re mixing it and we’re producing it. With each album and each new set of ambitions that pop up with each album we have to learn how to translate them technically in the studio.”

Dr Dog are often described as having the kind of sound characteristic of such little-known groups of the late 60s as The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The Band. Their sound certainly cuts against the grain of even the more alternative sections of the music industry, possessing a gravitas and sincerity that is anchored by a deeply attractive fundamental sense of optimism. I ask McMicken about his influences. “While we often get compared to British bands – especially The Beatles, the British invasion and all that sort of stuff – I do think that we are a very distinctly American band too” he says. “When I look at a lot of the music that comes out of the UK and the stuff that really seems to catch on, I realise how little we really have in common with that kind of thing.”

McMicken certainly has strong views about what constitutes good songwriting, having little time for the modern purveyors of what he dismissively refers to as “mid-tempo danceable medium pop or whatever.”

“You start writing songs, and the moment you write your first song you’re starting to slowly build up this wall between your understanding of yourself and the world around you” he muses. “It’s important to slowly build that wall like one brick at a time. With the whole phenomena of indie-rock, or whatever, a lot of times it looks to me like a bunch of people who go up and just slap that wall up real fast, and it’s teetering and wobbling, and it’s like it shows to me a kind of disrespect for all that’s come before it.”

Interestingly, McMicken seems to see himself working within a continuum of musical craftsman stretching back to, well, the late 60s.

“I’ve always appreciated the parameters that have been set out, or the guidelines that have been given by many songwriters or artists of the past,” he explains, adding: “it is easy to see when a person is just shitting all over their own history and showing no respect for what came before them.” Strong views indeed.

So, what does inspire McMicken in the contemporary music scene?

“I hear in most of the contemporary music that I like, definitely a strong footing in terms of respect for your history,” he says, before listing such luminaries as M. Ward, Joanna Newsom, My Morning Jacket and Ariel Pink as examples of people who are “exploring themselves within these tight parameters of this lineage of musical history.”

To which list might be added a certain group of canine physicians, McMicken’s praise of Mr Pink applying just as aptly to himself and his band.

“He knows where to give credit, he knows what he’s indebted to, and he’s very open about it.”